Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PRIVATE BUSINESS

NORTHAMPTON COUNTY COUNCIL BILL [Lords]

Read the Third time and passed, without Amendment.

TYNE TUNNEL BILL

As amended, considered; to be read the Third time.

MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL BILL [Lords]

METHODIST CHURCH FUNDS BILL [Lords]

MEXBOROUGH AND SWTNTON TRACTION BILL [Lords]

Read a Second time and committed.

Oral Answers to Questions — MINISTRY OF HEALTH

Social Workers (Report)

Mr. K. Robinson: asked the Minister of Health if he is now in a position to announce his decisions on the recommendations of the Younghusband Working Party on the Training of Social Workers.

The Minister of Health (Mr. Derek Walker-Smith): Not as yet, since to do so would prejudice the full consideration being given to these recommendations in the light of the views of the local authority and other organisations concerned.

Mr. Robinson: I appreciate that there must be full consideration of the matter, but is it not a fact that this Report has now been with us for over a year and that no decisions were taken in this matter for many years because this Committee and previous ones were considering the subject? Does he not agree that it is an extremely urgent matter, at any rate to the extent of getting the proposed National Council for Social Work Training under way so that we can get some more social workers, who are so urgently needed?

Mr. Walker-Smith: As the hon. Member will know, the setting up of the Council in question requires legislation. He will also have observed a reference to this point in the Conservative Election manifesto. Speaking generally, this is a matter in which there should be and will be no avoidable delay. At the same time, I would be wrong not to give proper and full considerations to the views of local authorities and other interested organisations upon this massive, comprehensive and useful Report.

Dame Irene Ward: Will my right hon. and learned Friend bear in mind that I shall be delighted to give him an assurance that if he is in trouble with the Treasury I will be on his side? It is all


very well for him to say that this point is referred to in the Conservative Election manifesto; what we want to see is legislative action in the matter.

Mr. Walker-Smith: I am always very gratified to have an assurance that my hon. Friend is on my side, but the conflict to which she refers in this case is quite hypothetical.

Mr. Robinson: Can the Minister give some indication when he will be in a position to announce a decision in this matter?

Mr. Walker-Smith: As soon as possible.

Private Patients (Drugs and Appliances)

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Health whether he now proposes to introduce legislation to enable private patients to obtain medicines by prescription under the National Health Service.

Mr. Walker-Smith: I have nothing to add at present to my replies to recent Questions on this subject, including my reply of November last to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Arundel and Shoreham (Captain Kerby).

Mr. Lipton: I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for that reply and express the hope that he will continue successfully to resist the misguided efforts of 178 of his hon. Friends to introduce this undesirable change into the National Health Service.

Mr. Walker-Smith: The hon. Member is straying into the realms of the hypothetical and imaginative. I will content myself with the answer that I have already given.

Mental Health Services

Mr. Iremonger: asked the Minister of Health if he will make a statement on the progress being made by local health authorities in the development of their mental health services consequent upon the provisions of the Mental Health Act, 1959; and if he will make special reference in that statement to developments in the treatment under Section 4 (4) of persons suffering from psychopathic disorder not associated with subnormality of intelligence.

Mr. K. Robinson: asked the Minister of Health whether he has now received

from all local health authorities their proposals for the development of community mental health services as provided for under the Mental Health Act, 1959, and the National Health Service Act, 1946; how many schemes have been approved and how many disapproved in whole or in part; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Nearly all local health authorities have now put to me their new proposals for providing mental health services; after interested organisations have been given an opportunity to comment, approval, with minor modifications, has so far been given in thirteen cases. The proposals show an intention to develop the services at a reasonable rate with the ultimate object of meeting all needs. It is not possible to say at this stage the extent to which the local authority services will be of value to persons suffering from psychopathic disorder.

Mr. Iremonger: While I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for that reply, is he aware that it justifies the much criticised decision which he took at the time of the passing of the Act to make these services not mandatory but to leave them to local health authorities? Will he make an opportunity from time to time to inform the House of developments that are taking place in this uncharted field?

Mr. Walker-Smith: Yes, I will certainly have that constructive suggestion closely in mind. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his remarks. The speed with which we have gone under the procedure we adopted has shown very good results to date.

Mr. Robinson: The schemes of many local health authorities are couched in somewhat vague terms because of their uncertainty of being able to get the money necessary to develop this service under the general grant. How many local health authorities have not yet produced schemes, and how long will it be before, according to the Minister's expectations, all local health authority schemes will have been considered and approved by him?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I do not consider that the schemes are couched in vague and general terms. They make constructive and positive proposals, many of


which, such as hostels, will require new buildings and additional staffing before they are fully effective.
There are, as the hon. Gentleman will know, 146 authorities concerned. Of these, 120 have submitted to me their formal proposals and another 14 have done so informally. That leaves 12 who have yet to come, and they are being followed up with a view to bringing home to them the desirability of submitting their proposals as soon as possible.

Leukaemia

Mr. Whitlock: asked the Minister of Health how many cases of leukaemia were reported in 1939, 1950, 1957, 1958. and 1959, respectively, in the area consisting of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire; and what were the arrangements for monitoring the presence of radio-strontium fall-out in the atmosphere in that area.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Figures of cases of leukaemia occurring in these areas are not available. The numbers of deaths recorded in 1950, 1957, 1958, 1959 are, respectively, 128, 163, 166 and 191. My noble Friend the Minister for Science informs me that fall-out radioactivity in air at ground level is monitored daily at Harwell and estimations are made of the radiostrontium content. Inhalation is a minor source of intake and a single station for the country is therefore considered adequate.

Mr. Whitlock: Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman realise that these figures will add greatly to the concern of people who have seen that the national figures are also on the increase, and that Strontium 90 in the bones of children and in milk is also greatly increasing? Does not he agree that these figures seem to indicate that there is some association between leukaemia and man-made radiation, and that they illustrate that there is a need for a supreme effort at the Summit to end the position in which innocent people and, possibly, future generations are being disastrously affected by man-made radiation?

Mr. Walker-Smith: As I have informed the House before, the incidence of the death rate of leukaemia has been rising since about 1920—in other words.

long before the particular source of man-made radiation to which the hon. Gentleman made particular reference. The trend in the area to which his Question relates is just about in line with the national average for England and Wales.

Dr. Summerskill: In view of the fact that the most eminent authorities attribute the increase in leukaemia to fallout, would the right hon. and learned Gentleman consider, in order that we should have full statistics, making leukaemia a disease compulsorily to be registered by doctors?

Mr. Walker-Smith: We can certainly look into that suggestion, but I do not know that I can go along with the right hon. Lady in her confident attribution of the causation of leukaemia. I am advised that no single cause accounts for this increase. Partly, it is due to greater awareness and to better diagnosis, and partly to the increasing age of the population, since this is primarily a disease of old people. Statistical studies are being made into the relation between small doses of radiation, such as can be caused by fall-out, and leukaemia.

Departmental Staff

Mr. Pavitt: asked the Minister of Health what is the number of undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and principals employed in his Department, the number of these administrators engaged in the section dealing with general medical services, the total staff employed, and the number engaged in the section dealing with general medical services.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Five undersecretaries, 24 assistant secretaries and 38 principals. In the section specially concerned with general medical services there are one under-secretary and one assistant-secretary, both part-time, one principal full-time and one principal part-time. The total headquarters staff is 2,320 and the equivalent of 14 full-time staff are engaged in the section concerned with the general medical services. Many matters connected with general medical services are dealt with elsewhere than in this section.

Mr. Pavitt: Is the Minister really satisfied that he can give creative leadership to general practice with only half the assistance of an under-secretary and


an assistant-secretary? Is he aware that there are over 21,000 general practitioners and that there would be considerable saving in hospitalisation if there were an advance in general practice, which could be secured if a little more drive were forthcoming from the Ministry?

Mr. Walker-Smith: The duty of administration of the general practitioner service is not carried out in my Ministry but in the executive councils throughout the country. Regarding the central policy and planning, it is not only a question of staff. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary and I seek to make some contribution as well in that regard.

Cosmetics

Mrs. Butler: asked the Minister of Health what consideration he has given to the amendment of food and drugs legislation in order to control the sale of cosmetics; and whether he will make a statement.

Mr. Walker-Smith: An amendment of existing legislation with this object would be considered if it were shown to be needed to avoid a risk to health; but on present evidence I am not convinced that such a need exists.

Mrs. Butler: In view of the fact that various skin trouble and other difficulties follow the use of unsatisfactory cosmetics and that the Institute of Weights and Measures Administration, whose members have an unrivalled knowledge of consumer protection, has recommended control in this country similar to that in the United States and Canada, would the right hon. and learned Gentleman study the evidence available with a view to bringing in amending legislation at an early date if the evidence shows it to be necessary?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I am, of course, willing to pursue any further studies into this or any other evidence which may be available. But the hon. Lady will appreciate that I should have to be satisfied on health grounds that a genuine reason exists before imposing this control.

Dr. Summerskill: May I ask whether the right hon. and learned Gentleman's scientific advisers reject the view held by scientists in America that certain lipsticks have carcinogenic properties?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I am advised that in fact the general medical view is that when used as an external application in very small doses these things have little, if any, injurious effects.

Mr. Speaker: Mr. Stewart.

Dr. Summerskill: I must press the Minister—

Mr. Speaker: Order. We are making very poor progress today.

Hearing Aids, Newcastle

Mr. Stones: asked the Minister of Health how many transistor hearing aids have been supplied to persons, other than schoolchildren, in the area covered by the Newcastle Hospital Board; what is the estimated number of such appliances needed to meet present requirements; and how soon they will be supplied.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministryof Health (Miss Edith Pitt): I regret that the figures for which the hon. Member asks are not available on a regional basis. In England and Wales as a whole, it is estimated that over half a million transistor hearing aids will be needed to replace valve aids now in use. My right hon. and learned Friend has not yet authorised their issue to adults other than war pensioners, but hopes quite soon to be able to give authority for a start to be made. Since it is bound to take quite a long time to complete so big a programme, he will suggest priorities to hospitals.

Mr. Stones: While thanking the hon. Lady for that reply, may I ask her to accept my assurance that the sooner the needs of the unfortunate deaf people in the North are met the greater will be their satisfaction?

Bone Cancer

Mr. Whitlock: asked the Minister of Health how many cases of bone cancer were reported in 1939, 1950, 1957, 1958, and 1959, respectively, in the area consisting of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Figures of cases of bone cancer in these areas are not available. The average number of deaths from this cause in the periods 1950–53


and 1954–57 were respectively 52 and 46; for 1958 and 1959 the figures were 48 and 37.

Mr. Whitlock: While those figures are less alarming than those for leukaemia, does not the Minister agree that there is a case for ascertaining whether there is a link between man-made radiation and terrible diseases of this kind?

Mr. Walker-Smith: All these things are under active study, but the hon. Member will appreciate that the figures for deaths are falling. Deaths from bone cancer amount to rather less than 1 per cent. of deaths from all types of cancer.

Spectacles

Commander Pursey: asked the Minister of Health (1) if he will now state what progress he has made in his review of National Health Service spectacle frames; what proposals he is considering for improving the present range; and when he is likely to announce the details of his new range of frames; and
(2) whether, in his review of National Health Service spectacle frames, he will consider abolishing most of the present obsolete frames and substituting for them more up-to-date types, in improved quality of material; and if he will include in the new range some half-a-dozen alternative colours.

Miss Pitt: The results of the sample survey of the demand for the various types of National Health Service frames and their liability to need repair and replacement are now being analysed. My right hon. and learned Friend intends, as soon as possible, to ask his Standing Ophthalmic Advisory Committee to consider this information and advise him which frames, shown to be little used, can be omitted, and as to any other changes needed in the list of frames, including specifications of existing frames.

Commander Pursey: Before making his final decision, will the Minister arrange for samples of his proposed new range to be displayed in the House of Commons so that hon. Members may have an opportunity of expressing their views before their constituents are committed to the range for another twelve years? Will he also make some arrangements to get the views of patients who

want to buy National Health Service frames as distinct from the views of opticians, who do not wish to sell National Health Service frames but want to sell private frames at exorbitant profits?

Miss Pitt: The Standing Ophthalmic Advisory Committee should be in a position to advise on the needs of the public. In addition, of course, the opticians themselves must be consulted. I shall ask my right hon. and learned Friend to consider putting the proposed ranges on view, although we have all had an opportunity of seeing the existing frames. I cannot accept that there has been no change in twelve years. A number of changes have been made and we are prepared to consider further changes.

Mr. W. Griffiths: Is it not a fact that the changes have been really insignificant? Is it not a fact that the Ministry has resisted any attempt to change the range available to people by bringing in a more modern range because it suits the Ministry very well for patients to buy frames privately, as that cuts down expense for the Ministry?

Miss Pitt: In fact, we have initiated the review on which I have been answering with the objective of making still further changes.

Midwives

Commander Kerans: asked the Minister of Health what is the number of midwives available in the Hartlepools.

Miss Pitt: Thirty-twofull-timeand seven part-time.

Commander Kerans: Can my hon. Friend say whether she has any plans for increasing the number of midwives in the Hartlepools area, in view of the large population there?

Miss Pitt: I would not have thought that was necessary because, on the figures, the Hartlepools are rather well off for midwives. At present, there are no vacancies for domiciliary midwives in the area and the number of hospital midwives is only slightly under the average establishment for the group, namely, twenty-four whole-time, six part-time and four pupil midwives.

Dr. Summerskill: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware that


domiciliary midwives are on call 123 hours a week for a weekly salary of £12; and whether he will take immediate action to improve these conditions

Mr. Walker-Smith: Pay and conditions of service of midwives are matters in the first instance for the Nurses and Midwives Whitley Council.

Dr. Summerskill: Surely the right hon. and learned Gentleman does not dissent from the appalling figures which I have given? Surely he should make representations to the Whitley Council? Is he aware that a refuse collector is paid £10 6s. per week for a 44-hour week, and that from next Monday his working week will be reduced to 42 hours? I do not grudge the refuse collector that pay, but, in the light of that, can the Minister justify the present payment to this very fine body of women, the domiciliary midwives of the country?

Mr. Walker-Smith: The system of hours is based on the recommendations of the Whitley Council, and, following the Rushcliffe's Committee's recommendations in the first instance, the hours of work are broken up into spells of three weeks of long hours followed by a fourth week of considerably shorter hours than those to which the right hon. Lady has referred. That and the night rota system, which many authorities have introduced, ease the pressure on the domiciliary midwives in their hours of work.

Domiciliary Consultative Service

Sir G. Nicholson: asked the Minister of Health if he will now institute an inquiry into the operation of the domiciliary consultative service as recommended by the Select Committee on Estimates.

Mr. Walker-Smith: The root of the matter here is the difficulty of obtaining factual information. I have decided to tackle this aspect as the next step and have been considering what additional record should be kept. I shall shortly be putting proposals to the medical profession.

Sir G. Nicholson: I am obliged to my right hon. and learned Friend for that Answer, but does it mean that an inquiry will not be undertaken now and there will be still further delay until the

additional information has been obtained? He will recollect that, when answering me on 29th February, he said that he would consider what action was appropriate after receiving the Report on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration. Later, he said that he would consider whether it is possible to get further and fuller information. Does that mean that we still have to wait for any result?

Mr. Walker-Smith: We looked at the Report of the Royal Commission to see whether it would help us in this connection, but as my hon. Friend knows, it did not take us very much further in this matter. As the matter now stands I take the view that if we can secure adequate records we may have all we need in the way of meeting the situation, in which case we shall have the results without the necessity of making any further inquiries.

Dr. Summerskill: In considering this matter, will the Minister remember that it is more economical for a general practitioner to use the domiciliary consultative service and pay a fee of something like four guineas or five guineas than to send patients into hospital where the charge for maintenance would be about twenty guineas a week?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I have that point very much in mind. It is, of course, true that the mere fact that the service has expanded does not in any way constitute evidence of abuse, because its expansion has an ameliorative effect on the pressure on hospital beds.

Industrial Plant (Atmospheric Pollution)

Mr. Sorensen: asked the Minister of Health what representations he has had in respect of the offensiveness and danger to health caused by the emission of fumes and dust from industrial plant; and what further action he proposes to take to ensure the suppression of this.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Honsing and Local Government (Sir Keith Joseph): I have been asked to reply.
My right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government does receive some representations about emissions from industrial processes. Means of control are provided by the Alkali &c. Works Regulation Act, 1906.


by the Clean Air Act, 1956, and by Part III of the Public Health Act, 1936. Emissions can best be controlled by the effective use of these powers and my right hon. Friend has no further action in mind.

Mr. Sorensen: Arising out of that answer—I think I caught up to it—may I ask whether the hon. Gentleman is not aware that whatever measures there might be which could be employed in this instance are not being employed? In my own district, the Borough of Leyton, I have had several complaints not only from industrial plant but from other plant. Will the hon. Gentleman look into the matter to see whether he cannot initiate some regulations or some organisation to cope more effectively with this matter?

Sir K. Joseph: No complaints from the hon. Gentleman's area have been received by my right hon. Friend or by his Chief Alkali Inspector in the last few months. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will send me details of any case that he has in mind.

Mr. Jeger: Where there are complaints by local residents, would the correct procedure be for those people to approach the local authority or to proceed direct to the Minister?

Sir K. Joseph: One has to distinguish between those that come under the Alkali Act, which come under my right hon. Friend, and those under the Clean Air Act, which go to the local authorities, but there can be no harm in applying either to the local authority or to my right hon. Friend for guidance.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOSPITALS

Manchester

Mr. W. Griffiths: asked the Minister of Health whether he is aware that the National Health Service patients of some general medical practitioners in Manchester, having been referred to certain consultants, are not seen by these consultants but by a registrar; and what steps are taken to ensure that all consultants attend regularly and promptly the sessions at the hospital in accordance with their contracts.

Miss Pitt: If the hon. Member will give me details of what he has in mind, I will have inquiries made.

Mr. Griffiths: Is the hon. Lady aware that these complaints originate not from me but from members of the medical profession in Manchester, and from patients? Is she further aware that I sent her Department copies of specific allegations made by a general practitioner—a family doctor—who said:
I am sick and tired of getting hospital reports back signed by the hospital registrar p.p. the consultant. It is not the registrar's opinion I want, it is the consultant's.
These are the sort of complaints we are getting, reinforced by many letters from patients who, after attending a number of times at the out-patients' department, suddenly discover, sometimes by accident, that they are being seen not by the consultant they imagined they were seeing but by the registrar—and sometimes even by a house man.

Miss Pitt: I have seen a newspaper cutting which contains that statement, but I do not think I have seen any official letter from the hon. Member with details amplifying such a statement. If he has such details, I shall be glad to look into them. In any case, it is for the consultant to arrange how his own clinic should be held.

Dr. Summerskill: In the event of a consultant not attending a clinic, is a deduction made in his remuneration?

Miss Pitt: Not to my knowledge, but I should like notice of that question.

Mr. W. Griffiths: asked the Minister of Health how many patients, during 1959, were admitted to beds at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, St. Mary's Hospital, and the Royal Eye Hospital, after private consultation with members of the medical staffs; and what was the average time that these patients had been on the waiting list.

Miss Pitt: I regret that this information could not be made available without a disproportionate amount of work by the hospital authorities.

Mr. Griffiths: Surely it is worth making an effort to find out where the truth lies in matters of this kind? Again, the cuttings from newspaper articles, readbyavast numberof people in


Manchester, have been made available to the Ministry. This publication has been followed by a vast volume of correspondence. Surely the Minister can make the effort to find out where the truth lies, removing a smear from the consultants, if a smear lies against them, or remedying the complaints of patients, if they are firmly based?

Miss Pitt: I hope that this question and answer may remove the smear to which the hon. Gentleman refers, because I am informed by the board of governors that in all cases patients who have been sent privately are put on the same waiting list as other patients and that their admission is determined by the relative urgency of the case. The fact that I am unable to give details without a disproportionate amount of work shows that all these people are mixed up with National Health Service patients, and without going through records of individual hospitals we could not say which patients were private and which came under the National Health Service.

Mr. Griffiths: It will be of help to us all if I give notice that I will raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest possible moment.

Ilford and Barking Finance Committee (Chairmanship)

Mr. Iremonger: asked the Minister of Health if he will seek from the Chairman of the North-East Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board an explanation of the reason why the chairman-elect of the Finance Committee of the Ilford and Barking Group Hospital Management Committee has not been re-appointed to the Committee, and that this action was taken without consulting the chairman of the Committee.

Mr. Walker-Smith: No, Sir. The appointment of members of hospital management committees is by statute a matter for the regional hospital board and I have no power to intervene.

Mr. Iremonger: I understand my right hon. and learned Friend's position, but is he aware that this decision has caused bitter resentment locally and that it is regarded universally as being underhanded business on the part of the board in getting its own back on a member of the committee who has, in the course of

his duty, criticised the board? If those who are on the boards behave like this, they will not be able to call on the services of men of the calibre we want.

Mr. Walker-Smith: These are not matters for me, but this is a conscientious board and I am sure that it would not use any unworthy methods in the appointments that it makes, in which it is animated only by a desire to serve the good of the hospital services, as I seek to be when I make my appointments of board members themselves. I hope that my hon. Friend and the House in general will appreciate that failure to re-appoint a sitting member, either to a hospital board or to a management committee, must not be taken as being any reflection on his competence. On the contrary, we do have to have a change every now and again, and there are, happily, more people anxious to serve than there are vacancies available. We are genuinely grateful to those who have rendered service and who are not eventually re-appointed.

Mental Hospitals (Accommodation)

Mr. Lipton: asked the Minister of Health what protests he has received about the shortage of mental hospital accommodation, as the result of which men are kept in gaol while awaiting admission to mental hospitals; and what replies he has made.

Mr. Walker-Smith: I have been unable to trace any protests addressed to me. The second part of the Question therefore does not arise.

Mr. Lipton: Is the right hon. and learned Gentleman aware that there must be several hundreds of people in gaol simply because the wish of the courts to send them to mental institutions cannot be satisfied owing to the shortage of accommodation? Will he investigate the matter in association with his right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to see that the gaols are not filled with people who ought to be in mental institutions?

Mr. Walker-Smith: If patients are committed to prison by the courts in the absence of an immediate place in a mental deficiency hospital, they can be, and are, transferred as soon as possible by an order made by my right hon. Friend under Section 9 of the Mental Deficiency Act, 1913.

Mr. Lipton: But is the Minister aware that such transfer can take place only if there is accommodation available? Is he aware that many of these unfortunate people serve their whole sentence in gaol because there is no place for them in a mental institution within the period of their sentence?

Mr. Walker-Smith: Yes, of course, I am aware of that. There would be no point in making an order unless there was a place to which the patient could go. Although there is still a shortage of accommodation, as the hon. Gentleman will know, we have made considerable progress over the last few years and our plans will result in a considerable further increase of this type of accommodation in the next few years.

Fulham Hospital

Mr. M. Stewart: asked the Minister of Health whether the plans for the rebuilding ofFulham Hospitalcontain provision for a maternity unit; and of what size.

Mr. Walker-Smith: The board of governors' proposals for the new hospital at Fulham include provision for a professorial obstetric unit which will include 50 beds, an isolation unit of 10 beds, a premature baby unit of 6 cots, an ant-natal clinic, laboratories and ancillary services.

Mr. Stewart: Will the Minister say whether this provision is to be in addition to that existing in the Fulham maternity home or will it replace it? Is it the intention to close the Fulham maternity home?

Mr. Walker-Smith: This will be in replacement of what is now at the Fulham Maternity Hospital.

Mr. Stewart: Is the Fulham Maternity Hospital to be closed?

Mr. Walker-Smith: When the whole of this accommodation is available there will be more obstetric accommodation than at present exists in the Fulham Maternity Hospital and the Charing Cross Hospital together.

Mr. M. Stewart: asked the Minister of Health when the rebuilding of Fulham Hospital will begin.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Planning is in progress, but it is too early to be able to say when building work will begin.

Mr. Stewart: Is the Minister aware that, according to my information, the plans for the new building have not yet been put before the governors of the hospital? Is he aware that in Fulham we have been very concerned over the fact that every time this subject is discussed the number of beds proposed for the new hospital seems to become smaller? We are anxious, therefore, to know exactly what is the plan before the number shrinks any more.

Mr. Walker-Smith: Plans in the technical sense do not exist as yet because the schedules of accommodation have not yet been fixed. We cannot have plans until we have the schedules of accommodation. I am convinced that in this matter of hospital building the right thing is to get a clear definition of the schedules of accommodation and adhere to it. That is the only way to speed up the procedure of hospital building.

Manor House Hospital, Walsall

Mr. W. Wells: asked the Minister of Health whether he will investigate the causes of the delay in admission to Manor House Hospital, Walsall, of people requiring gynaecological operations.

Miss Pitt: I am informed that the main reason is the limitations of the operating facilities.

Mr. Wells: Does not the hon. Lady agree that present delays of two-and-a-half years are quite outrageous and that most urgent steps must be taken? Can she say what steps are being taken to rectify this state of affairs?

Miss Pitt: The delays to which the hon. and learned Gentleman refers relate only to the non-urgent cases. Those cases which are urgent are dealt with at once. Steps are being taken, and the regional hospital board is investigating the possibility of reducing the waiting list by using other facilities in the region. Sketch plans for a new twin operating theatre suite have been examined in my Department and the preparation of working drawings should be authorised shortly.

Admissions

Dr. D. Johnson: asked the Minister of Health (1) if he is aware that half the women patients and one quarter of the men patients in the general medical wards of the Barrow and Furness Hospitals were there for other than clinical reasons, and that, if clinically unnecessary admissions were excluded from hospitals throughout the country as a whole, a ratio of 23 beds per 1,000 population would be sufficient instead of the present national average of 3·1 per 1,000; and if he will state the cost to the National Health Service of the ·8 per 1,000 beds occupied by such clinically redundant patients; and
(2) if he is aware that the admission rate to hospital amongst the general practitioners in Barrow-in-Furness varies from 61·7 per 1,000 patients per year to 107·9 per 1,000 patients per year without there being any apparent reason for such discrepancies; and what further inquiry he proposes to make with a view to ascertaining if such a wide range of discrepancy exists in the country as a whole in regard to the practice of doctors in hospitalising their patients.

Mr. Walker-Smith: I assume that my hon. Friend is referring to a Report published recently for the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust. Ratios calculated for one small area cannot be assumed to be valid for the whole country. While the Report brought to light a number of points that require careful consideration, in present circumstances the rate of hospital admissions is necessarily and properly dependent to some extent on social factors. Until other studies in this series on the demand for medical care in various areas have been completed, I think it would be unwise to seek to draw any general conclusions.

Dr. Johnson: May I ask my right hon. and learned Friend, however, in view of these rather startling figures, to press forward with researches in other parts of the country? Is he aware that his Answer to my first Question is a notional figure of something like £30 million to £40 million a year? In view of that, will he take a personal interest in this matter, preferably avoiding the appointment of any form of committee to study it?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I am very interested in the question of seeking to

reduce the number of cases which have to be dealt with in hospital, provided they can satisfactorily be dealt with in the community. On the question of the studies, we have several other studies in progress which should give us a more comprehensive picture of the national position as a whole.

Tetbury Hospital (X-ray Apparatus)

Mr. Kershaw: asked the Minister of Health how long the X-ray apparatus at Tetbury Hospitalhasbeenout of order; and what steps are being taken eithertorepairitorprovidea replacement.

Miss Pitt: Since January. A new machine has been ordered, but it has been found that additional protective work is necessary. It is hoped that this will be completed in about eight weeks' time. Meanwhile, cases are being dealt with at Malmesbury.

Mr. Kershaw: Does not my hon. Friend underrate the inconvenience caused to this rural hospital by not having an X-ray apparatus in the area? Will she inject as much urgency as possible into this matter?

Miss Pitt: Malmesbury is only five miles away. I am sure my hon. Friend will agree that since it was reported that the radiation dosage was such that the machine could not be used these protective steps are necessary.

Leeds Regional Hospital Board (Consultants)

Mr. George Craddock: asked the Minister of Health how many times in the past three years the Leeds Regional Hospital Board has rejected the advice of the pre-interview advisory committee regarding the appointments to consultants' posts.

Mr. Walker-Smith: While the Board has not in every case followed the order of preference suggested by the advisory appointments committees, which it is not obliged to do, all appointments were made from candidates recommended as suitable by the committees concerned.

Mr. Craddock: Can the Minister say how the members of the Leeds Regional Board compare with those of other boards, and is heabsolutely satisfied


that there is no discrimination on matters other than medical or clinical qualifications?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I am not sure that I heard the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question as closely as I should have liked. If, as I understood it, he asked me for a comparison with other boards, I could not without notice give a comparison with any other board, but if he would state precisely in what respects he wishes a comparison to be made, I will see what I can do to help.

Mental Defectives, Essex

Mr. Sorensen: asked the Minister of Health what progress has been made during the past five and 10 years, respectively, in decreasing the number of mental defectives in the county of Essex who are awaiting appropriate institutional accommodation; in particular, to what extent staffs for this purpose have increased; and what is the average period elapsing between medical recognition of the need of institutional care for mental defective cases and their admission to the institutions.

Miss Pitt: The Essex waiting lists were 222, 357, and 353 at the end of 1949, 1954, 1959, respectively. During the same period, 563 additional beds were opened in this region; a further 170 will be opened as soon as staffed; and the nursing staff increased by 234. Figures for average waiting time are not available.

Mr. Sorensen: Does not the hon. Lady realise that the actual position seems to be worse than it was ten years ago, in spite of all that has been attempted? Can she say whether some special effort is now being made to try to match up with the appalling waiting list, which is inflicting a great deal of misery upon patients and homes?

Miss Pitt: There are more beds and more nurses, as the figures which I have given show, but the need seems to have increased at the same time. Steps are being taken. The Essex County Council, as the local health authority, is making a start this year with the provision of hostel accommodation for mentally disordered persons not needing hospital care. Its new proposals for providing a mental health service undertake to meet

the needs of such persons in the course of time, and a review can follow after we know what steps are being taken.

St. Wulstan's Hospital, Malvern Wells

Sir P. Agnew: asked the Minister of Health (1) why St. Wulstan's Hospital, Malvern Wells, is to be closed on 30th June, instead of being turned over to other hospital use within the National Health Service: and if he will make a statement as to the immediate future employment of the nursing staff, and the maintenance staff, respectively;
(2) when he was informed by the Birmingham Regional Hospital Board that St. Wulstan's Hospital would no longer be required for tuberculosis patients; and what action he then took to have the hospital kept in use and its buildings properly maintained after it ceases to be required for the treatment of tuberculosis.

Miss Pitt: In December last the Board consulted us as to possible change of use on which it is at present obtaining the views of interested local bodies. In the meantime the rapid fall in occupancy has made early closure inevitable; I am informed that the hospital will be put on a care and maintenance basis until a decision is taken about its future use; my right hon. and learned Friend has asked the Board for a full report on the question of staff redundancy and will write to my hon. Friend as soon as possible.

Sir P. Agnew: Could not the information that the hospital was likely to close so far as tuberculosis patients were concerned have been given to the Minister earlier and arrangements made, therefore, to consider what its new use should be, which would have avoided the grave risk, as there is, of the maintenance staff actually being thrown out of employment and the hospital buildings to some extent deteriorating?

Miss Pitt: My right hon. and learned Friend was first contacted in December. The change has been very rapid. The bed occupancy last October was 107 and at the present moment it is down to four, and hence the necessity to consider quickly the possible future use of the hospital. A number of the maintenance and nursing staffs have already accepted alternative posts.

Sir P. Agnew: Will the hon. Lady make every effort to help the regional board to bring the hospital into its new use as quickly as possible and see that no hardship is caused to the maintenance staff and that other jobs are found for them?

Miss Pitt: Yes, Sir.

Oral Answers to Questions — MEDICAL RESEARCH

Dental Research

Mr. Janner: asked the Minister of Health, as representing the Minister for Science, what is the present amount of annual expenditure on dental research; whether he is satisfied that it is sufficient; and what steps are taken to ensure coordination of such research with that being undertaken in the same field by other countries.

Mr. Walker-Smith: The current annual expenditure on dental research by the Medical Research Council amounts to more than £35,000. Of the total annual expenditure by University Dentistry Departments, which is now of the order of £750,000, at least one-quarter may be said to be spent on research, but my noble Friend is still not satisfied with the scale of dental research in this country. International co-ordination in this field of research is ensured by the publication of results in the scientific Press and by the exchange of views at international conferences.

Mr. Janner: In view of the dissatisfaction expressed by the right hon. and learned Gentleman's colleague in this regard, what does he propose to do about it? Is he going to see to it that more money is available from Government funds to enable the necessary amount of research to be done? Is he aware that it is highly urgent and that if the research were undertaken, it would ultimately save the country a considerable amount of money?

Mr. Walker-Smith: We all want to see an expansion of this work, but as I think I have indicated before to the House, it is not a lack of funds which is inhibiting the progress but a lack of interest and enthusiasm on the part of dentists and scientific graduates. My noble Friend made a fine speech on the subject last July, a copy of which I shall be happy to send to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Janner: Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman realise that that is precisely what was said in reply to the first Question? Will he study it again and reconsider the matter with his noble Friend, because his noble Friend says that more money is necessary?

Mr. Walker-Smith: I do not need to study it again to be aware that there is no contradiction between my original Answer and the supplementary answer which I have given.

Mr. Janner: I will send the Minister a copy.

CYPRUS (SITUATION)

Mr. Brockway: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he will now make a statement on the negotiations in Cyprus regarding military bases and other matters and on the date for the inauguration of the independence of Cyprus.

Mr. Donnelly: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will make a statement on the progress of the Cyprus negotiations.

Mr. Driberg: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs if he will now make a statement on the progress of the negotiations in Cyprus; and if he will summarise in HANSARD, or in a paper to be placed in the Library of the House, the arguments put forward for retaining sovereignty, for the purposes of defence, over larger areas than the Cypriot spokesmen were prepared to surrender.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether he will make a statement on the course of negotiations in Cyprus.

The Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Mr. D. Ormsby Gore): The negotiations are still in progress between my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies and the Cypriot leaders.
There has been a steady narrowing of differences. We regret the slowness of the progress, but Her Majesty's Government are still hopeful of final agreement within the framework of the Zurich and London Agreements of last year.

Mr. Brockway: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the negotiations have now been going on for over four months? Is it not the case that the difficulty has mostly been over the extent of the British bases, and would he not agree that the first right of self-determination by any people is the extent of bases upon their territories?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: The actual issue of sovereignty over the bases is not in dispute and never has been in dispute from the start of the negotiations. On the issue of the area of the bases the difference now is very small indeed.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: Does my right hon. Friend recall that on 1st and 9th February the Foreign Secretary said that the British position on the extent of the area, eleven miles by eleven miles, was reasonable and indeed the minimum? Are we to understand that that minimum has been further whittled down in recent weeks and that the newspapers are correct in reporting an area of 100 square miles as now being under discussion? In general is the Foreign Office giving my hon. Friend the Joint Undersecretary of State for the Colonies full support in his negotiations with this very Byzantine archbishop?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I can assure my noble Friend that we are in very close contact with my hon. Friend in Cyprus every single day in this matter. With regard to the particular details of the negotiations, I do not think that at this final and very delicate stage I can add anything to what I have already said today.

Mr. Emrys Hughes: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that one of the justifications given for having bases in Cyprus is that they are to be used for the purpose of bombing the industrial areas of Southern Russia? In view of the obvious danger to the pilots, can he assure us that no reconnaissance planes are flying from the Cyprus bases?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: That goes quite a bit wider than the Question.

Mr. W. Yates: It was announced in Nicosia on Saturday that there had been a breakdown in negotiations and a deadlock, and indeed a ten-day adjournment. How are we to reconcile that with the statement of the Minister of State?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: No adjournment has been announced, but it is quite normal in the course of negotiations that at certain periods there are no meetings between the two principals involved. [Laughter.] Hon. Members who laugh must know perfectly well that that happens at certain stages of negotiations. Many consultations are required outside the actual negotiations, and these have resulted in certain periods when the two principals have not met.

Mr. Healey: Can the Minister of State confirm or deny the report which appeared in the British Press over the weekend that the only issue now at stake and under discussion is the very theological question whether the definition of the conditions under which the bases might ultimately be disposed of by Britain should be included in the Treaty itself or in an annexe? Does not that suggest that Byzantinism is by no means the monopoly of Archbishop Makarios?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I said that the differences between the two sides now seemed to me to be very narrow. I said also that I was not prepared to be drawn into the details of the final stages of these negotiations.

Mr. Shinwell: I have no desire to abandon British interests anywhere, even in Cyprus. Will the right hon. Gentleman be good enough to explain in simple language so that we can understand it why a few square miles will make all the difference to the strategic and military value of the island? Is he aware that when I had the honour of being in charge of a Service Department I never heard one admiral, general or air marshal claim that the island was of any strategic value? Why should a few square miles stand in the way of these negotiations?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I have said previously that as regards the area of the bases the differences between us now are very small indeed.

Mr. W. Yates: On a point of order As the parties in Cyprus were very close three weeks ago, I beg to give notice that I shall raise the matter on the Adjournment.

SPAIN (AMBASSADOR'S SPEECH)

Mr. Meodelson: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the speech which Sir Ivo Mallet, British Ambassador to Spain, delivered in Madrid on 19th April at a luncheon at the British Chamber of Commerce, in which the ambassador criticised those people in Great Britain who were critical of the Franco régime as taking too rigid a view of democracy, was made with his authority.

Mr. Ormsby Gore: No, Sir. It is not the custom for Her Majesty's Ambassadors to submit to my right hon. and learned Friend in advance the texts of the many speeches they may be called upon to make in the course of their duties.

Mr. Mendelson: Is the Minister of State aware that, at the same time as the Ambassador was pronouncing his praise of the Franco régime , not so very far from where he was making his speech some prisoners were being forcibly fed because they had protested against being kept in solitary confinement and against the generally inhuman conditions under which they were forced to be imprisoned? Will the right hon. Gentleman ask his right hon. and learned Friend to instruct the Ambassador that he should not in future pronounce praise on behalf of the United Kingdom of a Fascist régime which was imposed upon the Spanish people by the armies of Fascist Italy and Hitlerite Germany?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: Incidentally, the speech by Her Majesty's Ambassador did not contain praise of the Franco régime as referred to by the hon. Member, but I will arrange for a copy of the whole speech to be available in the Library, when it will be seen to have been a well-balanced speech in which our attitude to Fascism and Nazism was made abundantly clear.

WORLD REFUGEE YEAR

Mr. Ginsburg: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs whether the Government are now in a position to announce their decision regarding a further contribution to the World Refugee Year.

Mr. Ormsby Gore: As my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State informed the House in the debate on the World Refugee Year on 26th April, the Government's decision with regard to a final contribution will be announced before the end of the World Refugee Year which takes place in the United Kingdom on 31st May.

Mr. Ginsburg: I appreciate what the Minister of State has said, but would it not be a graceful gesture on the Government's part to cease being so coy and, now that World Refugee Year is nearing its close, to announce their further contribution without any delay?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: These matters are being very carefully considered at the moment.

Mr. Gaitskell: Has not this matter been under consideration for a very long time? Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that there is a strong feeling on both sides of the House, particularly in view of the magnificent response of the British people to the appeal for funds, that the British Government should long ago have increased their contribution? Are we really to understand that we must wait until the very end of May before any statement is made? Would it not be much more graceful to come out with an announcement immediately that the Government are prepared substantially to increase their contribution?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: Some of the considerations which the right hon. Gentle-ment has put before the House are very much in our minds, but we have already made one increase in the contribution and we are now considering what further measures we can take.

SOUTH KOREA

Mr. Brockway: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs what recent consideration has been given to the situation in Southern Korea by the United Nations delegation on the military Armistice Commission.

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I would refer the hon. Gentleman to the reply given to a Question by the hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg) on 2nd May.

Mr. Brockway: I have read that reply, but is the right hon. Gentleman unable to indicate any means by which his Government and this Parliament may express their feeling of concern about conditions in South Korea today, where only last weekend a conference of democratic parties, attended by the ex-Chief Justice and the ex-Minister for Social Affairs, including the Democratic Socialist Party, was suppressed by the régime? Is that the kind of democracy for which we fought in Korea?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: The hon. Gentleman asked me whether he had the opportunity to express his views on the situation in South Korea. Of course, he has ample opportunity to express his views on the subject. What he asks me in the Question is related to reports of the Military Armistice Commission. As my right hon. Friend said on 2nd May, we have received no reports from this body— indeed, no such report was expected, since the Commission is not authorised to concern itself with political developments.

Mr. S. Silverman: Does not the right hon. Gentleman recall that this country and other countries in the West involved themselves in very heavy sacrifices of money, material and men, for the purely political consideration of maintaining democracy in South Korea? If it is really true that no one outside South Korea is now concerned with democracy in South Korea, why did we risk involving the world in a third world war ten years ago for that very purpose?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: As I understood at the time, the real purpose of our going to the help of South Korea was to resist aggression by North Korea on South Korea.

GERMANY (BRUSSELS TREATY)

Mr. A. Henderson: asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to what extent the Western European Union Armaments Control Agency is checking, in West Germany, the undertakings contained in the modified Brussels Treaty of 1954 not to manufacture nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Ormsby Gore: The Arms Control Agency makes frequent inspections of German military depots and industrial

installations and collects other relevant information. It has reported that there is no production, on the territory of the Federal Republic, of any categories of armaments which that Government undertook not to produce.

Mr. Henderson: Is the Minister of State satisfied that the Agency is an efficient and effective body for controlling the production of weapons of mass destruction? If so, has the benefit of its experience been submitted to the Ten-Power Conference in connection with its discussions on a control organisation.

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I have no doubt that it is an efficient and capable body. With regard to the manufacture of atomic weapons, as the Agency has confirmed that no manufacture is taking place, machinery for carrying out that particular form of inspection is a little difficult to devise. As regards its relevance to the Ten-Power Committee on disarmament, there is some considerable difference between the control arrangements required in the country of a friend and ally as compared with control arrangements in countries which up till now have been our political opponents.

Mr. Healey: Would not the Minister of State agree that no control arrangement has any point, whether it is in the country of a friend or an enemy, unless it is 100 per cent. effective? Is he really suggesting that the Western European Union Armaments Control Agency is not seeking the power to be as effective in relation to Germany as any agency would seek to be in relation to a universal agreement?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: What I have said is that the Agency as at present constituted is highly efficient for carrying out this particular task. It is considering the possibility of improving its facilities in certain matters, and we shall give it every encouragement in so doing.

Mr. Gaitskell: In view of the supplementary question of my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey), will the right hon. Gentleman consider giving us a little more information about how the Agency is operating? Would he, perhaps, consider circulating information in the OFFICIAL REPORT or


making a further statement in the House telling us how the Agency operates and how successful it is?

Mr. Ormsby Gore: I can say that a very considerable amount of information is contained in the Agency's annual reports, and I understand that its fifth annual report is in the Library of the House.

Mr. Warbey: Can the right hon. Gentleman say whether the German Federal Government have yet ratified the Convention, drawn up over two years ago, which would enable the Agency to make surprise visits to private armament factories? If the Convention has not yet been ratified by that Government, is not the whole business just a farce?

Mr. Ormsby-Gore: No, the business is certainly not a farce. I must check on ratification, but my impression is that the Federal Government have not yet ratified the Convention.

SOUTHERN RHODESIA (CONSTITUTION)

The Minister of State for Commonwealth Relations (Mr. C. J. M. Alport): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I would like to make a statement.
Sir Edgar Whitehead and my noble Friend the Secretary of State continued the series of discussions which they have been holding on the future of the Southern Rhodesia Constitution.
The United Kingdom Government stated that their ability to accept a scheme which would reduce or withdraw the powers vested in the Secretary of State in relation to the Southern Rhodesia Constitution would depend on whether arrangements could be devised and agreed by both Governments which would provide effective alternative safeguards, particularly in respect of discriminatory legislation and land rights, and in respect of amendment of the Constitution.
Sir Edgar Whitehead put certain broad proposals designed to provide such alternative machinery. It was agreed that these should be the subject of joint study by the two Governments, and that a further meeting should be held later in the year and before the Federal review.

Mr. Marquand: I should like to ask the Minister of State three questions. First, did Sir Edgar Whitehead put forward proposals which, in the words of the statement, "would reduce or withdraw the powers vested in the Secretary of State"?
Secondly, why does Sir Edgar White-head want a further consultation before the federal review, and why has that been agreed? Is Sir Edgar still contemplating secession from the Federation?
Thirdly, and most important, is the hon. Gentleman aware that the removal of any sort of safeguard protecting the Africans from discrimination, whether in regard to their personal or to their land rights, would not be accepted by this House of Commons unless it were asked for by the African majority of Southern Rhodesia after a proper process of democratic consultation?

Mr. Alport: First, the right hon. Gentleman wild know from the statement I have just made that the proposals put forward by the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia were in a preliminary form. Therefore, it would not be possible at present to judge whether they will meet the considerations which the United Kingdom Government have said are the prerequisite of any reduction or withdrawal of power.
Secondly, I cannot say why the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia wishes to have a further conference before the end of the year, before the federal review, although, of course, it is natural that he should wish this matter should be proceeded with, from his own point of view, with as much speed as is possible in the circumstances.
Thirdly, I have noted what the right hon. Gentleman has said, although, frankly, I am not aware that he has the right to speak on behalf of the House of Commons in this matter. This is a matter which the House of Commons will no doubt decide for itself in due course.

Mr. Marquand: Is the Minister aware that I have the right to speak on behalf of the Opposition—[HON. MEMBERS: "Which part?"] I speak on behalf of the Opposition, and I know that the view I have expressed commands the support of my right hon. and hon. Friends. Will the Minister of State remember that this


Constitution of Southern Rhodesia is a matter for the House as a whole, in which the opinion of the Opposition has to play an important part, and always did?

Mr. Alport: The right hon. Gentleman makes his claim to speak for the Opposition with more confidence than might, perhaps, be true of some of his colleagues, but I do recognise—as, indeed, I said in answer to the right hon. Gentleman's supplementary question— that this is a matter for the House of Commons in due course.

Sir G. Nicholson: Is my hon. Friend aware that on both sides of the House there is keen appreciation of the heavy responsibility resting on this country for the protection and welfare of all races in that part of the world? Will he undertake that no final decision is reached by Her Majesty's Government before the views of the House have been obtained?

Mr. Alport: We are fully aware—as, indeed, the actions and policies followed by Her Majesty's Government during these last months and years have shown —of the very great importance of fulfilling our responsibilities to all sections of the community in Central Africa, and certainly to the Africans, who form a very important section in that community.

Mr. Brockway: Is it not the fact that this Government and Parliament now have the right to veto legislation in Southern Rhodesia that is discriminatory on racial grounds? Is it not a fact that the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia is now asking for the withdrawal of that right of this House? If that is so, will the Minister of State be very careful indeed not to accept any proposals that will limit the right of this House to safeguard the African population in Southern Rhodesia?

Mr. Alport: I do not think that on this occasion I should go into the details of the provisions of Sections 28 and 31 of the Southern Rhodesia Constitution. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman has stated them absolutely correctly, but I know the meaning of his supplementary question, and in so far as it relates to those two Sections it is perfectly true that in respect of that my noble Friend the

Secretary of State has responsibility under the Constitution and, therefore, of course, to Parliament.

Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas: Does the Minister appreciate that the great advantage of the present guarantees that are embedded in the Constitution is that they provide for decision by an outside independent Power—namely, this country—and that no guarantee that is simply an internal Southern Rhodesian matter can possibly be a substitute for the guarantee that is at present embedded in the Constitution? I am not asking for details, but will the hon. Gentleman say whether the nature of the scheme that he has under consideration envisages this country giving up its responsibility with regard to the Africans in Southern Rhodesia?

Mr. Alport: At this present stage I think that I can go no further than to remind the hon. and learned Gentleman that the statement I have just made spoke of "effective alternative safeguards". The hon. and learned Gentleman is, of course, quite right in emphasising the importance of ensuring that any alternative is as effective as the provisions at present in the Constitution.

Mr. Dugdale: What is the point of making this statement if we are not to know what these proposals are?

Mr. Alport: The point of making the statement is to provide the House—as my noble Friend and I thought that it would wish—with the results of the discussions that have so far taken place between by noble Friend and the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia in this the second preliminary stage in the general discussions on the future of the Southern Rhodesia Constitution.

Mr. Thorpe: Since this will affect the status of the Federation, can the Minister of State say whether Sir Edgar Whitehead intends to give the Monckton Commission the benefit of his view, or does he intend to boycott the Commission?

Mr. Alport: That is not a matter for me, but for the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia.

Mr. Callaghan: I want to return to the question of consultation. Does not the Minister's last statement but one mean


that the House of Commons will not have the opportunity to examine the proposals until conclusions have been reached between Sir Edgar Whitehead and Her Majesty's Government? Assuming that the Government stand on that, whoever has the right to speak for us, who will speak for the Africans.
I should like to ask the hon. Gentleman a question that I have asked of him before and to which I have not had an answer. What are he and Sir Edgar Whitehead doing to ensure that the views of Africans, on any alternative means of safeguarding their rights—and the Africans are suspicious about Sir Edgar Whitehead safeguarding their rights— might be made known so as to make sure that when the matter finally comes to this House we can know what are the views of the Africans in the territories, because although we may be their protectors they are the object and the subjects of the protection?

Mr. Alport: The hon. Gentleman is as well aware as I am that the final say in a matter of this sort on the form of constitutional change rests with Parliament in the United Kingdom. As far as consultation with the Africans is concerned, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said on 18th February:
… in the event of any change being made in the Constitution of Southern Rhodesia, the interest of Africans would of course be given full weight."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th February, 1960; Vol. 617, c. 1417.]
That statement was repeated by my noble Friend when he had an interview with representatives of certain African political interests in Southern Rhodesia.

Mr. Callaghan: The hon. Gentleman will see, will he not, that giving the views of the Africans due weight is not necessarily the same as consulting them about proposals? Is it not reasonable, in circumstances such as these, where tension is so high, and where some of the African leaders are still in detention, that the proposals which are now being discussed between Her Majesty's Government and Sir Edgar Whitehead should be made known to the millions of African people whose future is affected by them, so that they can tell the House of Commons how they view the alternative safeguards that are now being discussed?

Mr. Alport: It has always been contemplated that, when these proposals which come from the Southern Rhodesian Government have reached a point where they are available for general discussion in Southern Rhodesia, general discussion will take place, as is quite clear, but that is a matter which must be for the initiative of the Southern Rhodesian Government.

Mr. Gaitskell: Why should this be left to the initiative of the Southern Rhodesian Government? Surely Her Majesty's Government have a very direct responsibility in this matter. I should like, first, to ask the hon. Gentleman what arrangements Her Majesty's Government are making to ensure that the views of the African people in Southern Rhodesia are made known upon this issue. Why should they be brought in at the last minute in these discussions? Why should they not be consulted earlier?
Further, when this joint study which the hon. Gentleman mentioned in his statement is to take place, why is it necessary that a further meeting should be held presumably with a view to a decision before the federal review? Will this not confront the federal review with a fait accompli in this matter? Why the hurry? Will the Minister please answer these questions and give some information?

Mr. Alport: The right hon. Gentleman will realise that the discussions have been going on since November of last year, and, while there is the proper hurry that is associated with changes of this sort, what we are most concerned with is that whatever answer comes out of these discussions should be one which carries full support here and in Southern Rhodesia itself.

Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas: Including the Africans?

Mr. Alport: Of course, including the Africans. Secondly, the responsibility for making certain that that support is forthcoming rests in the first place upon the Government which are taking the initiative with regard to the change—in fact, the Southern Rhodesian Government themselves.

Mr. Gaitskell: Is it not a fact that under the Constitution Her Majesty's Government are responsible for seeing


that there is no discriminatory legislation against the Africans in Southern Rhodesia? Even if one concedes that that responsibility has not be adequately discharged, the responsibility remains. If that is the case, surely it is Her Majesty's Government's responsibility, before consenting to any change in the constitutional arrangements, to ensure that the African people for whom she speaks, and on whose behalf she acts, should be properly consulted?

Mr. Alport: What should be the nature of the eventual conference on this matter, if a conference takes place, is a matter for decision later. I have been reporting on the last round of the discussions and I referred in my statement to the next round. It does not necessarily follow, although it may be possible, that that is the decisive round.

Several Hon. Members rose—

Mr. Speaker: Order. There must be some limit to these questions.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,

That, notwithstanding anything in Standing Order No. 7 (Time for taking Private Business), any Private Business set down for consideration at Seven o'clock this evening by direction of the Chairman of Ways and Means may be taken after Nine o'clock.—[Mr. R. A. Butler.]

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY

[13TH ALLOTTED DAY]

Considered in Committee.

[Major Sir WILLIAM ANSTRUTHER-GRAY in the Chair]

CIVIL ESTIMATES AND ESTIMATES FOR REVENUE DEPARTMENTS, 1960–61

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That a further sum, not exceeding £20, be granted to Her Majesty, towards defraying the charges for the year ending on the 31st day of March 1961, for the following services connected with Primary Education in England and Wales, namely:


CIVIL ESTIMATES, 1960–61


£


Class IV, Vote 1 (Ministry of Education)
…
 align="right"10


Class V. Vote 3 (Exchequer Grants to Local Revenues, England and Wales)
…
10


Total
…
£20

Orders of the Day — PRIMARY EDUCATION

3.46 p.m.

Mr. Anthony Greenwood: When my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark (Mr. Gunter) drew our attention recently to the shocking conditions at the Crampton Street Primary School in his constituency, where, through no fault of the London County Council, 274 children are housed in five temporary huts of which two date back to the last century, and where there is feeding accommodation for only 68, I have no doubt that many hon. Members thought that that was an exceptional case. Unfortunately, it is not. It is only one of many hundreds throughout the country.
Our purpose today is to call attention to those many primary schools where there are oversized classes, or inadequate equipment, or which are housed in dilapidated insanitary buildings and are called by some organs of the Press the "slum schools" or, in the more colourful language of the Daily Express, "schools of scandal." Because the time


is limited today, I propose to concentrate upon this latter aspect of the problem.
I want to make perfectly clear that we do not belittle the post-war achievements in primary education. New methods of teaching have been introduced. The numbers in classes are falling. The number of all-age schools has been reduced. Many fine new schools have been erected under Governments of both political parties and much new equipment has been brought into use. We willingly accept all this, and I hope that the Minister will not confine himself today to those things because the very magnitude of those achievements highlights, in contrast, our failure to do more in the way of modernising or replacing the slum schools. It would be a great mistake for any of us to underestimate the growing frustration and indignation among teachers and parents, or, indeed, the long-term effects upon our educational system as a whole.
The hopes of local authorities were, of course, raised by the White Paper on secondary education. I quote from paragraph 27:
The building programme will also allow for the building of any new primary schools needed to meet local increases in the number of children, or to replace the worst existing schools: and the enlarged programme of minor works should be specially useful for bringing many primary school buildings up to date.
That was fine talk but, unfortunately, developments have belied it.
High interest rates, restrictions on capital expenditure, the rise in the cost of local government services, the operation of the block grant, combined with the Minister's rigid control of educational building—which, incidentally, makes nonsense of the Government's claims that the block grant would give local authorities much greater say in managing their own affairs—have prevented a realisation of the hopes aroused by the White Paper.
Let us look at the overall picture. For the year 1960–61, local authorities asked for £117 million for their school-building programmes. This was cut to £55 million by the Minister. For 1961-62, they asked for £97 million, and this was cut to £60 million. When the

Research Department of the House of Commons Library, last week, at my request, asked the Ministry for collated details of cuts made by the Minister in local authority programmes for primary schools, it was told that the information was not available.
It is surprising that this should be so. But in consequence I have worked through about 500 newspaper cuttings to try to discover the extent of the need and the paucity of the help that the Government are giving. I did that because I wanted to see whether the picture presented in that interesting publication of the National Union of Teachers, "Fair Play for our Primary Schools ", still holds good.
The survey upon which that publication was based arose out of a questionnaire sent to 2,300 primary schools in eight counties and eight county boroughs. I am assured by the National Union of Teachers that the local education authorities concerned were not selected on the basis that they were known to be bad authorities, but to give a fair cross-section representing industrial boroughs, rural districts, councils with both urban and rural conditions, and so forth.
Out of the 2,300 primary schools written to, 64 per cent., that is to say, 1,488, replied. Of those, 911 were built before 1900 and only 257 were built since 1930. There was no water sanitation in 99, and 485 had no hot water. Six hundred and twenty-two were without a head's room or staff rooms. At 456, children had to take their meals at their desks. I should like to see the occupants of the Treasury Bench eating stew on sloping desk tops.
I will quote from the survey only two examples, one to show that modern planning does not always achieve all that it should, the other to show that the bad old conditions linger on. The first relates to a school built as recently as 1958. There, the report is as follows:
For a hundred children (increasing), four teachers, three canteen staff, one supervisor … only three water closets and one urinal are available. All drainage to septic tank. There are only three wash basins ".
The other example is as follows:
The lavatories are the worst feature—they are of the pit type, pits having to be scraped out and contents buried within boundary wall. Ample supply of water available nearby, but as we are shortly (?) to have a mains supply —perhaps in five years' time—nothing is being done about it".


That is a school with 176 children on the roll.
The survey was made in 1958. What do we find today? I shall give the Committee some examples. Beginning with Shropshire, I quote from a report in The Times of 28th March which says:
There are still 46 schools in the county with earth closets and 51 with chemical closets. There are 35 without a piped water supply, six with no artificial lighting … and eight lit by oil".
I pass now to Norfolk. The North Norfolk News, on 26th February, quoted the County Education Officer for Norfolk as saying that 80 schools in the county could justify the most vigorous criticism. The County of Essex submitted a minor works programme to the Minister for £1,154,000. The Minister cut it to £625,000, in spite of the appalling conditions obtaining in many of the country schools in Essex. In addition to that, he cut a number of new schools from the county's major works programme, including, to give one example, the Roding Central County Primary Schools, which it was intended to build to take the place of three small primary schools all of which have earth closets —all this within 25 or 30 miles of the City of London.
When Croydon submitted a minor works programme of £129,000, the Minister cut it to £65,000. Shortly afterwards, the Norwood News had a heading:
Wiring in schools is unsafe. It's 50 per cent. below standard set by Ministry ".
The report goes on to say that in 46 schools in the County Borough of Croydon, the electrical work was 50 per cent. below the standard required by the Ministry of Education. In Croydon's schools, there were 20 radios which were not working and 40 pianos which were unusable because they were in need of repair. There was gymnasium apparatus which could not be used until a little money was spent.
I am sorry that the Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary are being so supercilious about the details I am giving. We are told of craft rooms with no sinks, of playgrounds with no seats. We are told that in four of the schools there were worn-out projectors which could not be replaced because there was not the money with which to replace them. This is all in the County Borough

of Croydon, where the Minister has cut by 50 per cent. the minor works programme submitted to him by the local education authority.
In Bournemouth, not one of the most irresponsible Left-wing authorities, the minor works programme was cut from £220,000 to £40,000. It is no wonder that authorities as different as Bournemouth and Cardiff have protested to the Minister in the strongest terms, in common with dozens of other education authorities throughout the country.
I turn now to Wiltshire. The Wiltshire News of 26th February said that 56 schools in the county needed sanitation. When the Minister received the county education committee's minor works programme for £227,000, he cut it down to £185,000, which was less than it had had in the previous year.
Perhaps the most ironic case of all is that of Monmouth, where every school child has received a leaflet emphasising the importance of washing the hands after going to the lavatory. According to the South Wales Echo of 9th March, only one school in the town has hot water. Can the Minister really be surprised that the Monmouthshire County Council is pressing for freedom to decide its own priorities?
This sad and squalid story can be repeated throughout the country. I could give examples and figures from Kent, Surrey, London, Derbyshire, Birmingham and a host of other authorities.

Mr. Godfrey Lagden: I have listened with great interest to what the hon. Gentleman has said. He has referred to Essex. Lest he has strayed a little beyond his brief, I should remind him that the County of Essex is controlled by his own political friends, and that they quite recently expressed their deep satisfaction at the manner in which the Minister has met their claims for both improvements and new schools. In case it has escaped the hon. Member's attention, I should remind him that Essex has been opening over one new school a month for the past eighteen months.

Mr. Greenwood: I have a document from my friends in the County of Essex which does not entirely support what the hon. Gentleman has said. The point we are making, which has clearly escaped his notice, is that it is not the fault of the


local authorities themselves. It is the fault of Government policy. The County Council in Essex, first, had estimates— I am speaking from memory now—of £1,900,000, and cut them down very substantially, to just over £1 million, on its own initiative; but the Minister cut them still further, to just over £600,000.
I said that I could give examples from other authorities, but I want to confine myself to three more examples. First, I want to tell the Committee what I found in the Ashton-under-Lyne Reporter of 4th March. I find that in that Lancashire town of Ashton, during a recent outbreak of Sonne dysentery among school children, Dr. Simpson, the Medical Officer of Health, made a survey of 14 Ashton schools. He found that
in 13 of them the facilities for maintaining only a reasonable standard of hygiene were sub-standard. In the 14 schools the deficiency with regard to lavatory and washing accommodation amounted to 40 per cent.
Dr. Simpson tells us that in one infants' school there is only one lavatory for the use of 60 children, and goes on:
The scene at playtime, or at times of emergency, can be imagined.
This is in a county where the Minister has cut down the school building programme and has struck out of it five primary schools which the education committee believed to be badly needed to replace primary schools at present housed in bad premises.
The second example comes from Kidderminster, in Worcestershire. Only in January, because there was an outcry on the part of the parents, 30 children were moved to a church hall from a building in which the water came through the roof and had to be collected in buckets, and where the parents maintained there were rats and mice. At almost exactly the same time as this was happening, the Birmingham Weekly Post was complaining that the Minister had cut the Worcestershire allocation—and I quote—
because Worcestershire was so well ahead with its building and reorganisation programme.
The next example is from the County of Somerset. Here I quote from the News-Chronicle of 1st March the words of the Chief Education Officer, Mr. W. J. Deacon, who said:

This year we planned to make an all-out attack and applied to spend £427,000 on our dilapidated schools. But the Ministry of Education has cut that to £180,000.
The great majority of our schools need to be remodelled to bring them up to new standards laid down by the Ministry.
But at the rate we are now moving it will be another 50 years before the last are brought up to this standard.
What does that mean? Let us take the case of the village school of Enmore. It is one of 60 schools which have to share between them the £375 for minor improvements which is all the county is able to afford under the programme the Minister has sanctioned. That village school is lit by oil, although there has been electricity in the village for the last two years. The Daily Herald has referred to the children there as the "children in the twilight". Why cannot the Somerset County Council help a school like that? The answer is given by the County Education Officer himself in the Somerset County Herald of 20th February. He said:
The will is there; the anxiety is there. All that is missing is the allocation of funds by the Minister.
What a topsy-turvy, crazy world it is, in which the Russians can get a rocket on the moon, but the right hon. Gentleman cannot get electricity into the village school at Enmore, or get rid of 46 earth closets in Shropshire.
Surely the Minister's crowning humiliation must have come when a widow in Lancashire, reading of the plight of the children of Enmore, offered to pay the £80 which was all that was needed to provide electricity in that school. I hope that the widow's mite made the Minister feel small, but the Minister is a resilient and, indeed, a precocious man. He went to the microphone on Saturday night, and after demolishing a number of arguments which I had not heard advanced went on to say:
The man in Whitehall is a long way off. It is much better to put your problem to your local councillor.
Does not the Minister realise that he is making it impossible for local councillors to give an answer to the people who come to them and complain? He is keeping the local education authorities in a strait-jacket.
Cannot the right hon. Gentleman give them more freedom in respect at least of


minor works? Does he not trust the local authorities not to embark on programmes they cannot complete? I am sorry that the right hon. Gentleman is busy. There are many things upon which he ought to be busy, but perhaps he could direct his attention to them at some other time. Can the Minister seriously claim that he and his staff are better qualified than the county hall or the town hall to decide whether the lighting in one school is more urgent than the plumbing in another?
What the Minister is really telling us in practice—but not in party political broadcasts—is that the gentleman in Whitehall knows best. That is a proposition which I never found very attractive when it was advanced by certain of my own hon. Friends, and I find it wholly repugnant when it comes from the right hon. Gentleman. Or is the Minister saying that our economy is so perilous and lopsided that we cannot do these things, that a nation which spends £2,000 million a year on drink and tobacco, which can squander money on weapons that cannot be used, and can put on such a wonderful show of majesty at times of national rejoicing, cannot find £10 million or £20 million for these neglected children?
I hope that the Minister today will be able to tell us that he is going to do five things. First, to increase the present allocation of £18 million for minor works; secondly, to raise the present ceiling of £20,000; thirdly, to make it possible for local education authorities to increase their expenditure on books, stationery and equipment; fourthly, to announce the details of his programme to provide another 8,000 places in training colleges; and, fifthly, to give the local education authorities permission to go ahead with replacing the old, obsolete, dilapidated primary school buildings. I hope that he will be able to give us some encouragement along those lines, because otherwise the results will be grave.
There will be frustration and despondency on the part of the local education authorities. This is already making itself felt. There will be indignation and a sense of injustice on the part of the parents. There will be increasing difficulty in recruiting and retaining teachers. And, perhaps most important of all, the pupils in many of today's primary schools will not be

equipped to take advantage of our greatly improved secondary schools when, finally, they reach them. It is because we demand fair play for our primary schools and the children in them that we have raised this subject today.

4.9 p.m.

Mr. J. C. Jennings: It is very pleasing to hon. Members on this side of the Committee to see that the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) has recovered from his recent indisposition, and has come back to treat us to a speech which was quite up to his form. I shall try to follow him as closely as I can on some of his arguments about buildings. In doing so, may I say that it is a very great pleasure for me to open the debate from this side of the Committee?
Primary schools as separate entities are a comparatively recent innovation. This is not generally known, but it has some bearing on this very important subject. It was only in the 'thirties that primary education as we know it today started, after the Hadow Report and the subsequent reorganisation, when primary schools were organised in separate areas as separate schools quite apart from all-age schools. Unfortunately, primary schools took over the old all-age schools. The matter was finally departmentalised by the Education Act, 1944, when primary, secondary and technical schools became separate entities.
It is from the conversion of the old all-age schools into primary schools in the 'thirties that much of the problem adumbrated by the hon. Member for Rossendale stems.

Mrs. Harriet Slater: Under a Conservative Government.

Mr. Jennings: I would remind the hon. Lady that in 1929–31 we had a Labour Government. I am not trying to argue politically. In my contributions to education, I have always attempted to argue educationally.

Mrs. Eirene White: The hon. Member has emphasised the fact that he is discussing the time after the Hadow Report. Almost all of that time was under his party's administration.

Mr. Jennings: I accept the point. The Hadow Report and reorganisation was a tremendous step forward. If the hon. Lady is prepared to give us credit, I am quite prepared to take it.
The kingpin of this debate—let us not shirk it—lies in the document which the hon. Member for Rossendale quoted extensively. That was issued by my own union, the National Union of Teachers, and was entitled "Fair Play for our Primary Schools". We on this side agree that black-spot schools or slum schools should be replaced, renovated or remodelled as quickly as possible. I say that sincerely. It is right and proper that attention to such schools should be highlighted. The pamphlet issued by the N.U.T. did that, and the hon. Member has done that. But it is just as illogical to consider this booklet separately without fitting it into the whole picture as it is to take one sentence out of the hon. Member's speech and judge the whole policy of the party opposite by that sentence. One must try to put the subject into proper balance and perspective, and I shall try to do that.
I pay tribute to the N.U.T. for what it has done, by its propaganda and general policy during the past few years, for education, and for letting people see what progress has been made in education. With this document we must also consider two other magnificent pieces of educational propaganda of the N.U.T. One was the magnificent exhibition which it staged at Olympia last year, which gave this country a clear picture of the tremendous progress made in post-war years in education, including primary education. During the last few weeks, it has issued a film which was shown twice on B.B.C. television which was so good that it was brought to the House and shown here. This film is called, "I Want To Go To School". It was commissioned by the N.U.T. and it dealt with an ordinary primary school. Anyone who saw that film will realise what magnificent work is being done in our primary schools.

Mrs. Slater: Would not the hon. Member agree that wonderful work has been done often because of the loyalty and service of the teaching staff? Would it not be much better if it could be done in the type of school which the film portrayed rather than in the slum

schools to which not only that pamphlet referred, but to which the committee which considered school building referred a long time ago?

Mr. Jennings: I could not agree more with the hon. Lady. All that I am trying to do is to put this booklet in balance and perspective and point out that the N.U.T., in its propaganda, has considered all sides of the question. It has every right to issue a pamphlet like this and concentrate on bad schools and to bring to the notice of the public and of the House the question of bad schools. It has kept a balance, and that is all that I wanted to prove.
We must view primary education against the background of the whole educational picture. That is essential and important. We must consider not only what has not been done, on which the hon. Member for Rossendale concentrated, but what has been done already and what my right hon. Friend the Minister has said that the Government intend to do. It is logical that if Governments are blamed for all that goes wrong, they should be given some credit for all that goes right. A lot has gone right in the educational world during the post-war years, and here I give credit to both sides of the House. We on this side make no apology for our record. We are proud of our work. Our sincerity and will to continue our good work cannot be questioned, and we intend to proceed with it.
Let me deal in more detail with this booklet and then with the question of buildings. As the hon. Member for Rossendale said, a questionnaire was sent out in 1958 to 2,000 primary schools in eight county boroughs and eight counties. This booklet is not entirely condemnatory of the Government. Much of it is commendatory of the Government's policy. On page 6, it is stated:
Not all the comments"—
that is, from the 64 per cent. of schools which replied to the questionnaire sent out—
are unfavourable, but, taken together, they indicate that physical conditions vary".
The language of this booklet is not as strong as that of the hon. Member.
Fourteen hundred and eighty-eight schools, that is, 64 per cent. of the schools to which the questionnaire was sent,


replied. In 1958, at the time of this questionnaire, there were 21,000 primary schools. It would be easy for my right hon. Friend, or the Parliamentary Secretary, to take another sample—say, the 10 per cent. sample of good schools—and another argument, apart from the argument of the hon. Member, could be given.

Mr. Greenwood: Surely the hon. Member is not suggesting that his own union chose a particularly bad section of schools.

Mr. Jennings: Not a bit.

Mr. Greenwood: The National Union of Teachers claims that it took a fair cross-sample of schools. If the Minister did that, there is no reason to suppose that the result would be different.

Mr. Jennings: I am not suggesting that the union did that; I quite accept what it says, and what the hon. Member says. I am simply saying that it is quite easy to take samples in order to arrive at the requisite conclusions. Hon. Members smile, but I am telling them the truth.
Not all the book is condemnatory of the Government. At the end it comes to certain conclusions and makes recommendations, three of which compliment the Government. On page 17, it says:
We hope that as a result of the Government's encouragement a much more generous attitude will be taken in respect of renovation, modernisation and expansion of old buildings…
The key words are:
as a result of the Government's encouragement".
I then turn to page 20.

Mrs. Slater: Read it all.

Mr. Jennings: I will. The hon. Lady can follow me as I read, and anything I miss out or twist she can tell me about. On page 20, the document says:
We particularly welcome the Government's intention to complete the reorganisation of all-age schools, a step which will benefit the children of both primary and secondary school age. We also welcome the Government's intention to take steps to reduce the size of classes…
That is a commendatory word from the N.U.T. to the Government.
Further the document says:
We therefore welcome the Minister's decision to implement the recommendation of

the National Advisory Council that it is necessary to provide 16,000 extra places in the training colleges….
The hon. Lady can read on from there. In the rest of the five paragraphs there is hardly anything with which my right hon. Friend could not agree.

Mrs. Slater: Will the hon. Member read the first comment, beginning, "We recognise", under "Conclusions and Recommendations", on page 17?

Mr. Jennings: Certainly. The document says:
We recognise that some of the objectives set out below cannot be achieved without considerable expenditure.

Mrs. Slater: Read on.

Mr. Jennings: The hon. Lady must not get impatient. I am going along quite nicely. I learnt to read at a primary school.
The document goes on to say:
At present about 3 per cent. of the national income is devoted to education.
That statement is completely out of date now. It is 4 per cent., or over.

Mrs. Slater: Read on.

Mr. Jennings: Certainly.
The proportion is no greater than before the war….
But it is; that is the whole fallacy of the statement. It is now out of date, and in asking me to read this out the hon. Lady has given me an opportunity to state that the proportion is now over 4 per cent. of the gross national income.

Mr. J. Idwal Jones(Wexham): Will the hon. Member give his authority for saying that the proportion is 4 per cent. or over 4 per cent. of the national income?

Mr. Jennings: I cannot remember the name of the document, but the author was an economist called Vaizey. I have just been handed it. The book is, The Cost of Education, by John Vaizey. If hon. Members read that they will find that Mr. Vaizey estimates that the proportion is now over 4 per cent. I have another authority which hon. Members opposite will not accept, namely, the authority of the Conservative Research Department.

Mr. Idwal Jones: The Minister's statement is that it is 3·2 per cent. or 3·7 per cent. of the national product.

Mr. Jennings: My statement comes after that of my right hon. Friend's, so I am all right.
We must consider this problem of buildings and primary education against the general educational background. This year we are spending over £800 million. Soon it will be £1,000 million and it is prophesied that by the 1970s it will be £1,500 million a year—equivalent to our present defence bill. It has risen from £217 million a year in 1946–47, to £337 million in 1950–51; £525 million in 1955–56; and £800 million now. This is not a party point; I realise that costs have risen.
We know the picture of training college expansion. On Saturday night, in his broadcast, my right hon. Friend said that we now have in the pipeline provision for an increase from 23,000 to 47,000 places. There is an extension of £95 million in respect of universities, already in the pipeline, and in technical and technological education the figure is £100 million, plus another £60 million, all in the pipeline. We have met the challenge of the bulge, and, in the postwar years—and here I give both sides credit—we have provided a place for every child without using the shift system, as has had to be adopted in many other countries. That is a story of progress of which this country can be proud, and it is against that background that we should look at the question of primary education.
It is a good thing to bring to the notice of the public the fact that much has yet to be done in primary school buildings. It is no less important, however, to draw attention to what has already been done. First, over £700 million has been spent on school buildings since the end of the war. That cannot be denied. One-third of our children are now being educated in new schools—that is, schools built since the end of the war. Dr. Alexander, who has sometimes not been exactly a friend of the Government, writing in Education on 15th April, said:
If the present rate of building programme is sustained every school in the country could be replaced completely every 30 years.
This is the pace set by the present Government.
What of the future? Over the next five years we plan a building programme worth £300 million—£150 million of new and improved schools in 1960–62, and £61 million each year in the next three years— and half this money is to be spent on improvements. At present, the total educational building programme is running at the rate of over £100 million a year, by far the biggest building programme ever attempted.
Half the new schools built since the end of the war have been primary schools, during which time 1 million new primary places have been provided. On those figures alone it cannot be said that primary schools have been neglected. The building of schools has had to follow the bulge. In 1945–51, it was right for the Labour Government to concentrate on the place where the bulge would first have its effect—in the infant and junior schools. In those years, therefore, the ratio of primary schools to secondary schools was 4 to 1, quite rightly.
As the bulge moved from the primary to the secondary schools we had to plan for the extra children coming into the secondary schools, and the ratio was somewhat altered. From 1951–59, the ratio was three primary schools to every secondary school. It should be noticed that in each case the emphasis was still on primary schools. These figures prove that primary schools have not been starved.
Both Governments have had to face the vexed question of priorities, and if there was a choice between providing a place for a child for whom there was at present no room, or improving an existing school, there is no doubt which the Government or the local authorities would choose. The choice was obvious.
The statisticians went "haywire" in their forecasts of the number of children for which the Education Act, 1944, would have to cater. They were all wrong. Married women produced far more children than the authorities expected, and, therefore, we have now got 2 million more children in school than we expected to have, 2 million over and above the 1944 forecasts, and we have had to look at this question of providing new schools for those extra children. With all this new building and the emphasis on new schools for new areas, it is perfectly obvious that some of the existing primary schools and


secondary schools had to take places a little farther back in priorities, but the ceiling for minor works was raised to £20,000. In answer to some of the figures which the hon. Gentleman gave, I would remind him that in 1959 to 1960 the authorities asked for minor works £20 million and got £17 million.
We on this side of the Committee aim to eliminate all-age schools, and here again we have made remarkable progress. In 1951, for instance, there were 5,636 of these schools. There are now—at least, there were in 1959 — 1,685. To put it another way, 13-year-olds in this type of school in 1951 were 16·9 per cent. of the school population, but are now only 5·2 per cent. The N.U.T. booklet deals with this matter and I would answer that these figures have to be taken into account.
I come to the question of the size of classes. Here, also, we are charged with neglecting the primary schools when considered in relation to the secondary schools. Again, I say that much still remains to be done, but, also, I say again that quite a lot has been done. In 1951, in primary schools there were 132,944 teachers full-time; in 1959, that number had gone up to 144,000. In 1951, oversize classes in junior schools numbered 30,000—in round figures—but in 1959 that number had been reduced to 23,000. To put it another way, the difference in the number of oversize classes in junior schools is this, that whereas, in 1951, the proportion was 37·5 per cent. it has now been reduced to 24·2 per cent. This is progress. This fact is important, that oversize junior classes reached their peak in 1954, three years before the junior school population reached its peak.
In other words, we had more than overtaken the growth in school population. They had been reduced by almost half by 1959, and my right hon. Friend has promised on behalf of the Government virtually to eliminate these by the middle 1960s. We also know from our debate on the Crowther Report and from my right hon. Friend's speech at the N.U.T. Conference, at Blackpool, at Easter, that he has placed as priority No. 1 an increase in the supply of teachers and a reduction in the size of classes.
I conclude by quoting from the editorial of the Schoolmaster of 1st April. I think that this puts this question of

buildings and primary education in its right perspective:
The primary schools are not 'news' except when reports of dilapidated buildings and primitive working conditions find their way into the press. Indeed, they suffer in the matter of publicity from the very fact that they have largely worked out their problems, assimilated the tremendous revolution in teaching methods which has transformed them in the past decade, and are now getting on solidly with their job, with complete confidence in their aims and in the way to go about achieving them.
In the middle of the greatest expansionist educational programme that this country has ever seen, primary education must and most certainly will get its full share. This Government's record in the past and their stated plans for the future are something of which any Government can be justifiably proud.

4.35 p.m.

Mr. Alan Fitch: It is with some trepidation that I follow the hon. Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings), who has had professional experience. I have not that experience. I am a layman. Many of my hon. Friends around me on this side of the Committee have had professional experience, teaching experience. What I shall say in my brief intervention will be said from the point of view of the layman. I certainly would not be so foolish as to try to tell anybody how to do his job, but I have for a long time been interested in the problem of education.
Prior to becoming a Member of the House I had been, like many of my hon. and right hon. Friends on both sides of the Committee, a manager of a primary school and a governor of a secondary modern school. If I am, as I suppose I should, to declare my interest still further, I must say that my wife is a teacher, my sister is a teacher, my father-in-law is a retired headmaster, my mother-in-law was a teacher, my sister-in-law was a teacher, and my brother-in-law is at present a headmaster; but the speech that I am about to deliver is my own. That, no doubt, will be realised as I go on.
It appears to me that the aims of a primary school are to give children the tools whereby they can do a job; that is, to teach them to read and write, to teach them while they are very young to be able to work alone and to be able to work in groups. It seems to me


that the main aim of a primary school should be to develop their general abilities rather than any specific or specialist abilities.
I have been very perturbed indeed by the number of my constituents who have been to see me about what they feel is an injustice in our primary schools. I must emphasise that I am speaking only as a layman. There are other hon. Members here who may be more competent to deal with this than I. However, those people seem to be suffering from a sense of injustice about streaming in our junior schools.
It appears that streaming starts, roughtly, at the age of seven or eight, and that the children who are put into the B stream invariably remain there for the rest of their school career. I think that this segregating of children at such an early age—to speak moderately—is not a good thing, because this label sticks to them throughout their school career. It might be better if classes were known to be Mr. Brown's class, or Miss Black's class—terms which do not denote the type of class and do not involve a feeling of superiority. The terms "A and B streams" bring to the minds of most people the feeling that one set of children is more able than the other.
Again, the basis of assessment seems to me at least to be questionable. I must emphasise again that this is merely a layman's observation. I do not know whether it is accurate to say that one can determine the I.Q. of a child at seven. In any case, is I.Q. everything that matters? Surely it is not. It is only part of the personality of an individual and should be treated as such. A child at seven is influenced very strongly by its home environment, by parental interests, and some children at least may appear at the age of seven to be far more able than they actually are. I have great doubts whether it is possible to stream children accurately at such an early age.
There is the parents' point of view. Here again, there seems to be a sense almost of snobbery which has grown up. I blame this partly on the 11-plus examination. The whole aim of many of our primary schools is to get as many children as possible through that examination. That is fair enough; one would expect it. The effect on the

parents seems to be that if their children are in the B stream it is some sort of reflection upon the parents. That is completely wrong. The parents seem to take this as if their own prestige or their own intellects were involved. A number of parents complain to me that, although their children seem quite bright, they are only in the B stream, and one feels that the parents themselves feel that they are being judged.
Then there is the teachers' point of view. I hesitate to talk about the teachers' point of view when I am not a teacher. Teachers who are teaching B streams and teachers who are teaching A streams have a very different task. It is easier, I imagine, to teach children in the A stream than those in the B stream. I know that there is the argument, and it is a fairly valid one, that we must have some sort of segregation. We must give the more able or more intelligent children the harder tasks and the ability to go ahead. Therefore, we must do some kind of streaming.
I think that it might be better if the streaming did not start at the age of seven but at a year before the 11-plus examination and took the form not so much of streaming into groups of A and B, but of streaming along the lines of subjects. It is possible that a child may be bright at mathematics and dull at English, and vice versa. If streaming were along the lines of subjects, I agree that we should need far more classes, but I think we should get rid of the dangerous tendency to segregate our children wrongly at an age at which it is not possible to do it accurately.
I pass to the question of accommodation. My hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) obviously spent a very busy weekend going through all the newspaper cuttings, and he has given us a vivid impression of the state of some of our primary schools. I do not intend to dwell on that, except to say that in my constituency of Wigan six of the primary schools—and I say, incidentally, that I have visited every school in my constituency, primary, secondary, modern, grammar, and technical—were built before 1870 and are, therefore, almost a hundred years old. It stands to reason that schools of such age cannot be suitable for modern educational needs. Nine were built between 1870 and 1902.
On the question of minor capital works, I hope that the Minister will raise the amount. He has done so recently from £10,000 to £20,000. In reply to a Question which I put to him, he said that he considered that that was high enough. I hope that he will reconsider it, because these old schools, many of which are mainly primary schools, would help us to overcome our difficulties if an increased minor capital works allowance were made in respect of them.
The Minister also said, in a statement which he made a few months ago, that he was having discussions with the local education authorities as to the school building programme for 1962–63 and 1963–64. I do not know whether, today, he is prepared to make any statement on the allowances agreed upon. I emphasise what my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale said, that the local authorities were very disturbed indeed about the amount of £55 million they are allowed to receive in the 1960–61 building programme and the amount of £60 million for 1961–62 which was not enough for them to carry on the job that they must do.
On the question of the size of schools, I would refer again to my own constituency. In some parts of it, where slum clearance has been in operation, the classes are below the maximum of 40, which is a good thing. That has not actually solved the problem. It has solved the problem so far as some schools are concerned. Many of those children have gone to the new housing estates and sometimes to new schools, where the classes are greatly in excess of 40. I know that this is a problem for the local authorities, but it is also one on which the Minister should have something to say.
I want to make reference to those who have not yet been mentioned in the debate—children who are educationally subnormal. In a pamphlet issued by the Ministry of Education, entitled "Special Educational Treatment", reference is made in chapter 3, paragraph 25, to the fact—and this is only a rough estimate, according to the Ministry—that 10 per cent. of all schoolchildren are educationally subnormal. That seems to be a very high percentage. In places like Wigan, with a school population of 14,000, it means that there

are 1,400 educationally subnormal children.
Are we doing enough for these children? Obviously, the more able children must be helped; but are we not apt to forget those children who, through no fault of their own, are educationally subnormal? I wonder whether we are doing enough for them. This is a most interesting and absorbing subject on which I should like to speak much longer, but I will refrain, as I know that there are many other hon. Members who wish to take part in the debate.
The kind of primary schools which we have sets the pattern for our whole educational system. When a child enters a school the kind of education he receives, the teaching he receives, the discipline he gets and the environment in which he is taught, mould his life and can determine his future career. It has been said that we are spending 4 per cent. of our national income on education. The Minister has said that we must be prepared to spend 6 per cent., and I hope that 6 per cent. will soon become a reality.
As we approach the Summit Conference, we all hope that the deliberations of that conference will be such that we shall be able to spend more money on the constructive job of educating our people, which is the greatest safeguard democracy can have, rather than to spend it on methods of destruction.

4.49 p.m.

Mr. James Scott-Hopkins: I am very grateful for the opportunity to intervene very briefly in this interesting debate. I should like to follow the hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Fitch) along the lines on which he opened his speech, but I disagree with him that no school which is over a hundred years old is capable of fulfilling the modern requirements of education. I have personal experience of a school many hundreds of years older than that, and I can assure the Committee that the results from that school and many others like it are excellent.

Mr. Fitch: I was referring to schools in industrial areas such as Wigan, and not to public schools.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: I have personal knowledge of schools in both rural and


urban areas which are over a hundred years old, but which have been properly adapted to modern requirements. That is the key to the situation. As long as the school buildings are properly adapted, in many cases they are perfectly suitable to the modern requirements of education and quite often they produce very fine results.
I agree wholeheartedly with what the hon. Member for Wigan said about a certain amount of snobbery being attached to passing the 11-plus examination and getting into the grammar school stream. Perhaps this is outside the purview of this debate, because the answer to the problem lies in secondary school education. As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings), the amount of money which the Government are spending on education is increasing year by year. Secondary education is certainly getting its full share of it.
The answer to the problem of the 11-plus examination, therefore, is to increase the standard of secondary school education so that parents will realise that there is no slur of any kind if their child is found to be suited for that type of education rather than for the grammar school stream, and that the end result can be equally good and equally useful for children going to either of the two streams. Under recent Governments we have increased the standard of secondary school education, and we are still increasing it.
Moreover, I have been assured by headmasters in Cornwall that there are frequent opportunities for children who are late developers, who do not pass the 11-plus examination at the first effort, to be moved into the grammar school stream at the age of 12 or 13 if their qualities show that that is where they ought to be. That provides considerable opportunity for any chlid, if he is a late developer, to get into the proper place in keeping with his ability.
But the true answer, surely, is that secondary education must advance as quickly as possible so that the slur ceases to exist and children are equally happy and equally proud to be in either stream.
Perhaps I may refer to one point which worries me not a little about

primary schools. I come from a rural area in which we have a special problem. In Cornwall, there are a great many one-teacher schools and also many all-age schools. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Burton that only 1,685 all-age schools remain in the country, but in the County of Cornwall there are over 170 of those all-age schools. That means that a high proportion remain in Cornwall and that a great deal of expansion must take place if we are to overcome this problem. One of the difficulties is that we are extremely widely scattered and our population is small and thin on the ground. It is, therefore, particularly difficult to justify as large an expenditure as is needed to meet this requirement quickly.
I am gratified that in my constituency a new school is being built which will do away with two of these all-age schools. I believe that it is quite impossible to mix children up to the ages of 14 and 15 with young children starting school between the ages of five and seven. It makes it impossible for discipline and for teaching. The sooner this can be stopped by expanding our school building programme in areas where, although the population is small, they need a higher proportion of this expenditure, the better.
Another problem which worries me is the existence of these one-teacher schools. Here I must declare an interest. I am the father of four children, and one of my children has just left a one-teacher primary school. It is an excellent school, run by a lady who has in her class, according to the number of pupils at that time in the area, between 14 and 20 pupils. She has them all day long, from the time they arrive in the morning until the time they go home about 4 p.m. She alone looks after them. She has to see that they do their lessons and she has to look after them at play-time and during the school meal.
It is almost an intolerable burden. No matter how good the children may be, it imposes a tremendous strain on the one teacher—man or woman—who runs a school permanently on his or her own. I have personal knowledge of this school, and it is excellent in every way. The record of the number of passes to grammar schools shows that the standard


is very high. Nevertheless, I think that the burden imposed on the teacher is almost unbearable.
I wonder whether it would be possible in such circumstances to recruit and to use part-time teachers. We might use teachers who have retired and have moved to rural areas such as these for a quieter time. I am fully aware that at present no lists are available to show where teachers go when they leave the profession to retire, but surely it is not beyond the wit of man to compile such a list by writing to teachers who have retired and asking them to state their present location. Would it not be possible for such qualified teachers who have retired to come back to do part-time duty in the one-teacher schools? They might relieve the burden on two or three afternoons a week, or perhaps for an hour or two in the morning.
I hope that my right hon. Friend will take the time to look into this matter and to see whether it is possible to institute a scheme along those lines to relieve the pressure which is undoubtedly being borne by these very devoted men and women who are running one-teacher schools.
There is one other problem which we must not ignore. In rural areas such as Cornwall we are a shrinking population and, as a result, the number of teachers allotted to us by the Ministry often does not reflect the true position or the number needed for our very small schools. In several cases that is imposing an intolerable burden. For example, there might be a large number of children going to a village school, but because, overall in the county, the number of pupils is low, the allocation of teachers is low, and in that village school we are below the number of teachers required to give even a ration of 1:40 in the primary school classes. My own child was in a school with a ratio of 1:14, because that was the nearest school to where I was living, but that is not always the case.
This situation is not the fault of my right hon. Friend, but is merely a geographical mistake or coincidence. Nevertheless, I suggest that my right hon. Friend should look into it. The local education authority has submitted memoranda on the subject, and I ask my right hon. Friend to consider them very sympathetically when he looks at the matter

again, as I hope he will. In several cases the present situation is imposing severe hardship.
The main question, with which I want to conclude, arises from the fact that in our rural areas we face depopulation, for varying reasons with which I will not worry the Committee this afternoon. One of the most important steps would be to instil into the people who live in the countryside the belief that they will be able to give their children the very best possible kind of education which is available. We want the same standard in rural areas as the more fortunate people are now able to receive in urban and industrial areas, where the standard, perhaps, is higher. We want to be quite certain that children who live in rural areas are given the same chance.
There are many factors which are leading to the depopulation of the countryside. Let us make certain that one reason why people leave the countryside is not that they are unable to get proper education for their children. I am glad that in recent years, and particularly in the last eighteen months, my right hon. Friend has found it possible to spend much more money to increase the tempo of building and of the number of teachers being trained. I ask him, finally, to make certain that in rural areas such as Cornwall we receive our fair share.

5.0 p.m.

Mr. James Boyden: I follow the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) with some pleasure in his plea for the rural areas, and also in his tribute to the teachers. It seems to me that during the last ten years the very great progress that has been made in primary school techniques has been almost entirely due to the teachers and very little due to the politicians. I suppose that the progress in nursery and infant schools has far exceeded in success and scale the progress made in the grammar schools.
Even where, under both Labour and Tory controlled authorities, there has been much prestige in the grammar schools and a great deal more money has been spent on them, the progress in the primary schools has been outstanding. The Jeremiahs on the other side of the Committee, who have been associated with pleas for flogging and with similar activities, are apt to run down the public


system, to talk about the increasing number of illiterates and to decry the work going on in these schools. These people, however, are not on top in the Conservative Party. I am pleased to say that the more enlightened Members seem to be making the running today.
The pamphlet, "Standards of Reading", issued by the Minister of Education, states that the age group born in 1945 were, in 1956, on average, nine months more advanced in reading ability than those born in 1937 were in 1948. This very considerable progress is due to the teachers. In my own County of Durham I came across the other day, thanks to the Director of Education for Durham, what seems to me a remarkable tribute to teachers of mathematics. Like reading, mathematics is always thought to be a basic skill in the primary schools and one in which there has been particular difficulty in the last few years in making progress.
The figures I have are striking. It is true that they do not refer specifically to primary schools, but they provide a comparison between examination successes in mathematics in Durham County grammar schools and secondary modern schools. In Durham County grammar schools, 62·1 per cent. of the 16-year-olds passed in mathematics and in the modern secondary schools 58·8 per cent. That is quite remarkable. I do not think that the Durham County grammar schools are any worse or any better than other county grammar schools, but I think that many of our secondary modern schools are very good indeed.
The successes in the secondary modern schools must have been based on the work in the primary schools. As Sir Percy Nunn said:
The teacher of infant numbers is a teacher of mathematics.
These successes are quite remarkable when one considers the disparity between the effort, in terms of money, spent on the grammar schools and on the secondary modern schools.
Credit for this success is also due to the professional inspectorate of the Ministry of Education which has been disseminating the best information on what has been going on in these schools.

I should like to commend the Ministry's recent publication, "Primary Education", which supersedes the old handbook of suggestions. It contains the very best educational theory produced from the schools themselves. One of the revolutions has been that primary education today is concerned with children as children, and this publication calls for
… a firmer realisation that children's capacities should be exercised to the full.
I want to look at the record of how the Tory Party has contributed in nine years or so to assisting teachers, inspectors and training college authorities to make this progress with individual children. But, first, I want to make one or two references, in the matter of primary education, to the constant emphasis on the need for individual attention to young children. The document "Primary Education", on the later stages of the infant school, states:
The demands on the teachers are great. … in learning to write, the children need not only the best tools but help from the teacher, and this she can give only if she understands their capacities and difficulties.
A teacher's appreciation of the children's efforts … in spoken or written English … requires a nice judgment on her part as to what she might expect from each child.
It is essential that every child should enjoy success and equally important that he should not enjoy it without effort.
I could multiply those examples by a dozen. The Ministry's experts are constantly coming back to the central fact that the child needs individual attention. This is recognised in the public schools and in the sixth forms of grammar schools, but it is very little recognised in the primary schools. The Minister complacently thinks that a ratio of one teacher to 40 children is good enough for the primary schools.
The hon. Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings) paid tribute to the Minister for his efforts in securing sufficient teachers to make a higher ratio of teachers to children possible, but I would ask the hon. Member to look at the period 1951 to 1958 and consider what the Ministry was doing then about securing a sufficient number of teachers. I would ask him to turn up the figures of the amount of building activities which the Ministry recognised for the training colleges in 1951–58.
The striking fact is that in 1951 there was approval for teacher-training college building, both major and minor works, amounting to £1½ million. The same figure was not realised again at all in 1952–58. In 1952, immediately after the fall of the Labour Government, the expenditure approved was £850,000. In 1955 approvals amounted to £1¼ million. In 1956 they were £500,000. In 1958 they had crept up to £1 million, and this was at a time when the £ was not worth anything like what it was in 1951 and when the situation in the schools was much more obviously bad and there should have been far greater strides forward.

Mr. Jennings: Would the hon. Member give the figures for 1949–50 and 1950–51?

Mr. Boyden: I can look them up.

Mr. Jennings: The hon. Member has taken a year immediately after the fall of the Labour Government. For comparison it would be as well to take a year immediately before that.

Mr. Boyden: As a general principle there is no doubt that the Labour Government produced the best emergency scheme for recruiting that the country had ever seen. This was an achievement in very difficult circumstances. I took 1951 as the period when the Labour Party had finished and its policies and the resulting figures were there to be seen. One would have expected from the eulogies of the hon. Member for Burton that the Tory Party would have gone forward on that basis, but not at all. It has left the burden to the teachers in the schools and now at the very last stage it has been waiting for the Crowther Report. It has needed letters from Sir Geoffrey Crowther and speeches from the Opposition benches to get the Tory Party to do even the minimum that the Crowther Report recommends.
The Tory Party cannot get away with it. It did practically nothing to build training colleges and to encourage teachers, compared with what the Labour Government did in much more difficult circumstances. Had the Tory Government shown as much energy and willingness from 1952-59 as the Government are showing now, in tackling the problems of training teachers, the position in the

schools would have been totally different. There are, for example, 23,000 classes in primary schools which have 41 pupils, the average size of classes being 33, and that means, of course, a far higher figure effectively in front of the teacher.
Mention has been made of all-age schools. I would refer hon. Gentlemen opposite to Circular 283 which envisaged rural reorganisation being completed by 1st January, 1960. In County Durham we shall be lucky if all the children can be in modern schools by 1968, eight years after the Minister hoped that rural reorganisation would be completed. Between the promise and the fulfilment came Circulars 331 and 334.
No one can say that the County of Durham has not been on the Minister's heels, whether he be the present Minister or other right hon. Gentlemen who have occupied his position. In the last nine years, the building programme has been vigorously pursued, and wherever there has been the opportunity for rural reorganisation, for rebuilding antiquated schools and, indeed, grammar schools, the work has gone forward.
At the moment the situation is that there are 105 unreorganised schools in Durham. At the end of the year there will still be 92. If the Minister accepts the county's recently submitted programme for 1965—I hope he will—even then there will still be 10 modern schools to be built before all the children are in reorganised schools. Durham is a county which has spent a considerable amount on education, well above the national average, and which has always been willing since the war to build all the schools which it could possibly build.
There is a very considerable legacy from the past, as the hon. Member for Cornwall, North was saying, and much levelling up is needed not only because of the bad old days but because of the rural problem. Nationally, some 7 per cent. of senior children are still housed in all-age schools—to the detriment of both primary and older children. But the promise was 1st January, 1960.
One of the sad things about primary schools is the many bad primary buildings in the large urban centres to which my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) made reference. I


will quote the Minister's advice to teachers on conditions in schools. He said:
Conditions of life in school should be such as to allow order and convenience and make for social and physical well-being.
A school is a place specially intended to provide an environment that is good. Ugliness can creep in all too easily.
When I think of these phrases I think of the primary schools in the city which I had the honour to represent on the Durham County Council. I have no complaint to make about higher education in Durham City. The university has made great progress in the last few years, and there is a magnificent grammar technical school. The girls' grammar school, too, is being reorganised and rebuilt. We have a very fine technical college and two quite reasonable older secondary modern schools, and a third first-class new one going up.
When we look at primary schools we see a different picture. There is the tin school at Gilesgate Moor. I must say that the teaching in all these schools is excellent. As I said earlier, I am not going to make a comparison of the area which I once represented, but teaching in the primary schools is certainly very good, despite the buildings. In fact, I can think of only one such school where the teaching has been indifferent, and that has now changed.
Then there is the Gilesgate infants school with which I am most closely connected—

Mr. Jennings: Gilligate.

Mr. Boyden: Yes, the Gilligate Giants. This school has been put up to the Ministry many times as in need of rebuilding. It should have been rebuilt years ago. It is not a hundred years old, but it is certainly quite out of date. I admit at once that it now has electric lighting and central heating and that much redecoration has been done in what is a miserable old building. It is much better than it was, but it should really have been rebuilt.
Most of the parents and children live in a very pleasant housing estate where the general environment, apart from the east wind, is very good. It would have made all the difference to the whole life of the community, and, indeed, to the general uplift of the community, if it had

had a new school in the centre of the estate. But I lost that battle a long time ago, though not because of the Labour Government.
Then there is the St. Hild's model school, the demonstration school for training—an excellent school in extremely poor buildings. Those responsible for this school, too, have been to the county and to the Ministry pressing for a new school. The Bluecoat school, originally intended to be on the new site, is in the middle of the town and is very dangerous from the point of view of traffic. Unfortunately, three children have been killed near here on the busy roads of Durham. That is not the fault of the school, but the general effect of having an old school in a busy, congested part of the town is not to allow of its being developed on the proper lines.
Another school, St. Cuthbert's, which I am glad to say is being rebuilt, though the children are there at the moment, is a school which the health authorities were very likely to have condemned. But the Minister was prepared to put it in a programme and the school is now starting to be rebuilt in a more spacious, convex ient part of the city.
Another infants school, St. Margaret's, is on a very dangerous road and on a most restricted site. The teaching in it is very good. There are other schools, but if I were to disclose which school I considered is in the best building, I suppose that reference would be made to something which I did not propose to mention.
Nationally, bad primary schools buildings can be found in almost every urban centre. The black list of schools has been discontinued, but I would urge the Minister again to make a survey of schools to see if he could not put on the black list those schools which are not so bad that they must be pulled down or abandoned, but which are seriously hindering the teaching of primary children.
There are just two other things to which I wish to refer. If the Minister is sincere in his attempt to help the teachers in the schools and in getting more teachers, could he not consider some kind of assistance on the periphery of teaching, that is to say, could he not provide more assistance in the supervision of the children out of school hours, during


play-time and break-time and assistance for school meals and much more assistance in the clerical work?
AH these things would make the life of a teacher more reasonable and encourage more people to come into the teaching profession. It would not be very expensive to do this, and it would constitute a great gesture towards the teaching profession, indicating that the Minister meant business. I hope that the Minister will give very careful attention to what the N.U.T. says in its booklet. I join with the hon. Member for Burton in praising the N.U.T. for what it has been doing for the cause of education.
The booklet is an excellent booklet and the film is an excellent film. The Careers Exhibition, in which the Durham County children performed admirably, was most valuable. I am sure that we all commend the N.U.T. for helping to bring education a little more from the backwoods of politics to the forefront.
It is very good that we in the House of Commons should get heated about education. We are not, perhaps, as heated as we should be about it, but we are making progress. On page 13 of the booklet it says:
In many places the capitation allowances for books, stationery, equipment and furniture in the primary schools are entirely inadequate.
My own authority certainly does not fail in that direction. Further reference is made to craft teaching in the junior schools in which the real job of the teacher to create basic skills is distorted into producing saleable articles. As a result the teachers feel that they are being restricted and cramped in this field by producing work more appropriate to secondary schools.
I am certain that it is false economy to starve the primary schools and not to do much more for them. To recover from bad teaching in the primary schools is a much more expensive job than doing the thing properly in the first place. A certain amount of juvenile delinquency and some of our backwardness comes from those schools where the teachers are not quite up to the standard of those I have been describing and where the buildings and the support which the Government have been giving are not adequate.
I should like the Minister to put his new research team, which, I understand.

he is about to have as a result of the forward look in the Ministry, on to going through the reports of his inspectors over a fairly long period of, say, seven or ten years—I believe that most primary schools are inspected every seven years—and to include in a schedule the kind of things to which the inspectors draw attention, such as buildings, bad sanitation, bad lighting, bad heating, and so on. I should like them in the same way to go through the educational needs to which the inspectors draw attention—for example, shortage of books, out-of-date books or inadequate equipment generally for physical training or crafts—and to produce a statistical picture on that basis which could be published. The public would get rather a shock at the lack of some of the physical things which it is the duty of the Government to provide. On the other hand, there would be a reassuring picture of the actual teaching work that is being done by the teachers.
It is all very well for the Government to say that great things are ahead—I hope very much they are. I am not being cynical when I say that I wish the Minister every success in his struggle with the Treasury. The right hon. Gentleman has experience of economic matters, he is a man of considerable argumentative power and I hope that he will convince both his own backwoodsmen and the Treasury.
There is, however, a long record of neglect. In the last nine years, the Tory Government have not helped the teachers in the way they should. It is a credit to the teaching profession that our children have not been neglected more. The politicians have very considerably failed and the teaching profession has got us through.

5.22 p.m.

Mr. R. P. Hornby: During the last few months, we have had a great deal of discussion about secondary education, university education, the recruitment of teachers and technical education; a great deal of discussion about the secondary and later stages of education. We should scarcely be surprised if this had given rise to a feeling of anxiety amongst primary schools and those connected with them and to an inclination to say, "In all this educational discussion, how much


do we in the primary schools matter?" I am not at all certain that that feeling has not been abroad and was not, perhaps, one of the sponsors of the booklet of the National Union of Teachers and of a great deal of the discussion stemming from it.
As the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) has said, it would be false economy to starve the primary schools. Therefore, as an example of the attention that the House of Commons is paying to the primary schools, we should welcome this debate about them.
There is a strong case for saying that the primary stage of education is the most important of all. To quote merely two reasons for that, most of the experts argue that the early years are the most impressionable years of our lives, the years in which we are capable of learning faster than at any other stage. It is true, as other hon. Members have said, that if a person gets a good start in life, it is much easier for him to go on educating himself afterwards. For anybody who gets a bad start, it is much more difficult to catch up. To use a more statistical argument, the majority of children who leave school at the earliest possible age, spend more than half their school life in the primary school. That in itself is a good enough argument for taking primary schools seriously.
As hon. Members, on both sides, have said, a great deal of progress has been made in primary education. I shall not exchange arguments with the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland as to whether the greater responsibility for that lies with the teachers, with those who decide whether the schools shall be built, with the administrators, the educational inspectors, or who. The fact is that there has been great progress in primary education. I am glad that the figures concerning reading standards were quoted. The nine-month improvement in reading ability of the child born in 1945 as against the child born in 1937 is an important example of what has been done. In physical education, one sees signs of great improvements; and in buildings wherever one goes. In the use that is made of the curriculum, we see great signs of innovation and experiment in our primary schools. The hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Fitch) commented on

segregation in primary schools. My only point on that subject is that I hope that the hon. Member would agree with me, if he were present, that the right thing is to leave the matter to the head teacher in the school. If the head teacher thinks that particular advantages are to be gained in a subject by a certain group, he should be allowed to work out his own experiments with his curriculum and his grouping inside his class. That is the better way rather than to say from the House of Commons or from the Ministry that there should or should not be segregation from the age of 9, 10 or 11 or whatever it might be. The head teacher should be fully empowered to work out his or her own class organisation.
On balance, there has probably been more innovation and experiment in the primary schools than in any other part of our school system in recent years. I am not certain that it is not the work of the primary schools of which we have most cause to be proud. We have made great progress. Even so, a great deal remains to be done.
Nobody who defends what has been done in education by successive Governments wants to underestimate what remains to be done. We must face, and we have had to face all the time, the overall problem of 2 million extra children in the schools. This far more than anything else has accounted for the overcrowding, the over-large classes, the failure to catch up with the renovation of old buildings, and so on. That has been the crisis problem with which the Ministry of Education and every local authority has had to cope since the war. It has been made even more difficult by the deliberate action of the House of Commons in 1944, in passing the Education Act, and thereby setting the educational sights a great deal higher than ever before. Nobody in the House of Commons wants to go back on that decision.
The whole problem is complicated by a great many conflicting claims on national expenditure, which we shall not argue in broad detail now. Those crisis conditions are likely to continue. For one thing, expectations of a substantial fall in the birth rate are being falsified and over the next ten or fifteen years or more the schools look like being fuller than was expected. It is certain, as the


Crowther Report, reports on universities and almost every industrial and scientific report indicate, that we shall have to continue to set our sights a great deal higher than they are now, so that here again pressure will continue to make life difficult for the educational administrator, the Treasury and for those who are trying to get as much done as they possibly can. On top of that, even if we were satisfied with all that was being done, we still have not begun to nibble at the problems of educational aid overseas and the contribution which a country such as this should be making overseas. So that the pressure, which has been very great since the war, will be equally great, if not greater, hereafter.
In these conditions, what evidence is there that the primary schools have been neglected, and are likely to be neglected in the future? We should look at this question under three main headings —firstly, building; secondly, the size of classes; and thirdly, the morale and opportunities of the teachers in these schools.
It is no secret to any hon. Member who knows his constituency that there are school buildings which should not exist. Some are bad, some very bad and some a disgrace. We all acknowledge that and are trying to catch up. Why do these buildings still exist? First and foremost is the reason I have given —that we have had an extra 2 million children to put a roof over, and that has been no easy job. Faced with the problem of whether to destroy an old school and replace it by a new school, or whether first to provide a new school and later to replace the old one, every local education authority has had to say that it could not do without anything which it has. That has very nearly been the position—hence the desperately unsatisfactory buildings. There are some in my constituency and I am sure that there are some in every hon. Members'.
If we are to try to put this right, we must ask ourselves if the primary schools have been getting their fair share of new building expenditure. I understand that they have had almost exactly 50 per cent. of this expenditure. Whether that is or is not the right proportion can be argued either way, but it seems to me to be a fair share, bearing in mind that in implementing the Educa-

tion Act we had, in many cases, virtually to duplicate secondary school buildings.
It may also be asked whether education authorities and the Ministry have frequently got their priorities wrong, to the detriment of primary schools, when considering development programmes. Whenever my attention has been called to a particular grievance, a particular feeling that a certain primary school was a very bad one, or that a new primary school should be built, after I have seen the building I have frequently answered that I would not like that school to continue in existence for a moment longer than absolutely necessary.
I have followed up some such cases and have found that, within the context of the money available, the priorities have not gone hard against the primary schools. By and large, education authorities, in conjunction with the Ministry, seem to take a very great deal of trouble to arrive at what they think is the right order of building or rebuilding of their schools.
Should we be making more use of the minor works programme in addition to the increased building programme? Obviously we could raise the quota of the minor works programme. In many ways I would like to do that, but we should bear in mind one or two things before arriving at this obvious answer.
Firstly, if a local education authority knows that a school building is to be totally replaced sooner or later, it will be reluctant to spend more money than is necessary on temporary accommodation on that site. Secondly, there is very frequently a limit to what can be done by minor works within the context of the existing site. Thirdly—and this is the point about the plumbing tour on which we were taken by the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood)—a great many of the lavatories he so sedulously inspected could be dealt with under the existing minor works programme. That should be remembered alongside the strictures which he made. Twenty thousand pounds is quite a large amount of money with which to deal with the plumbing of an individual school. I understand that only the total figure available for minor works is inspected by the Ministry—which he criticised as being on the shoulders of


the local authorities—and not each individual item, so long as it is under £20,000. That gives a lot of scope for plumbing.
I now come to the problem of over-large classes. We are aiming at a maximum of 40 per class in primary schools. This does seem, to anyone who has ever taught, a somewhat unambitious figure. It is true that 25 per cent. of the classes contain more than 40 pupils, and we must take those figures extremely seriously. It is equally true that the main reason for that is not Government policy, but the problem of finding the teachers for these schools. It is perfectly reasonable for primary school people to ask why it should be thought that a maximum size of 40 per class should be set for primary schools whereas the figure is 30 for secondary schools.
That is a sensible, logical question for a weary primary school teacher to ask himself at 4 o'clock in the afternoon when he feels that he has just about had enough. Should we, perhaps, reverse the figures? Have we any idea at all as to what is the sensible use of our teaching resources? I suggest that we are giving too little attention to educational research. We have very little idea, other than hunches based, perhaps, on what we have heard of the personal experiences of teachers, as to what a sensible class size is. Is it the same size for different subjects? How much do we know about this? It is difficult to find money for anything, but it might be money well spent if we could find a little more in order to ask the question: what are we doing with our money and could we deploy our resources better?
I also agree with the N.U.T. booklet "Fair Play for Primary Schools" on this point. We should avoid transferring teachers from primary to secondary schools, as the bulge goes through. We should not debase existing standards in primary schools just to meet the admitted crisis in the supply of teachers to the growing secondary schools. We should at least try to hold the existing teaching force in the primary schools.
In worrying about the size of classes in primary schools, have we given too much thought to the school-leaving age and little to the entry age? I am not asking that it should be discussed seriously now, because the movement has gone out of the primary schools, but I

ask whether or not the age of five was the absolutely perfect and all-time right age of entry into primary schools.
Had we decided, or had hon. Members opposite when they took over the responsibility for education in 1945 decided, that the right entry age was six, that would have cut substantially the number of children to be catered for in the schools. I am not arguing that it would be the right thing to do now, but one ought to consider some of these problems. Still thinking of the size of classes, we come to the most important point of all, the need to recruit more teachers. In fact, the need to obtain more and better teachers comes a long way in front of the need for more and better buildings. If we can secure the teachers, we shall have made great progress towards the solution of our problems.
That is easy to say but it is a very difficult thing to achieve. I wish to know what is being done by the Ministry, the local education authorities, the National Union of Teachers and all others concerned to try to induce ex-teachers to return to the profession to assist us in our difficulties. The first hope for a larger teacher force in the future may be based on the return to the profession of such people, and the second hope is that, as we become a more educated nation, because of our better system of education, the "catchment area" for teachers will be greatly enlarged.
How much of a national issue have we made of this problem of attracting teachers back to the profession? Have we really brought home to the public how very badly these extra teachers are needed? I can imagine my right hon. Friend in the guise of a 1960 Lord Kitchener, as it were, with his face surmounted by a mortar board, appearing on posters on which is the statement, "Your country needs you in the teaching profession." But perhaps that is stretching matters too far. However, I believe that we have not yet begun to bring home to the public how badly we need more recruits of the right calibre for the teaching profession and I urge that we should do everything we can to that end.
The feeling which seems to be emphasised in the N.U.T. booklet "Fair


Play for Primary Schools" is that teachers in the primary schools are getting a poor deal. They have to contend with bad buildings and over-large classes, which seem to be the two things mainly affecting the morale of teachers. A teacher in a new school feels very different from a teacher in an old school and probably is a different person, because it is easier to do the job in a new school where the strain on the nerves of teachers is far less. Therefore, the more we can do towards reducing the size of classes—and that has top priority in the Ministry's policy—and the more we can do towards improving the building programme, the more will be achieved in improving the morale of the teachers in some of our schools.
Some primary school teachers feel that they get less than their fair share of attention. I hope that, as a result of this debate, we shall be able to do something to remedy that. I hope that the teaching profession will not resent my saying that I trust we shall not have too much of a feeling of touchiness on the part of members of the profession about their conditions of work. I am sure that teachers generally do not wish to create that impression and nobody else would desire to do so. Teachers, administrators and Parliament must combine in an operation against these problems. It would be a great pity if in an increasingly affluent society the teachers were to give the impression that some of them were an aggrieved society. I do not think any of us would wish that to happen, because it would be the worst service which could be done to the teaching profession and education generally. What members of the teaching profession have to do, and what so many teachers are doing, is to continue the great work of teaching in the existing schools and, secondly, to do all they can, with the help of Parliament, to mobilise public opinion to maintain and increase educational expenditure in the interest of our country.

5.46 p.m.

Mr. J. Idwal Jones: We had an interesting and valuable as well as a necessary debate on primary education. It is necessary because we have had so many discussions and read so much in the Press about secondary education. I am not suggesting for a moment that we have heard enough

about secondary education, because there is much leeway to be made up. As has been pointed out so often in this debate, the basis of our education is the primary school, and if the basis be not sound we cannot hope to have a sound superstructure.
I will not dwell long upon the size of classes. I wish to make clear that, in my opinion, the figure of 40 is too high. After all, a teacher has to teach individual children in the class rather than to address a public meeting of children. The Minister may argue that there are not sufficient teachers, and that to reduce the number of children in a class below 40 would also mean extra school buildings and extra classrooms. That is true, but the difficulties in which the Minister may find himself at present do not make the figure of 40 sacrosanct. The actual figure should be something far lower.
Regarding the difficulties over the supply of teachers, we are now reaping what we have sown, and the present Government are more responsible than any previous Government for the present situation. The present Minister of Education has held that office before. He was preceded by two other Ministers before returning to office. The previous Minister of Education—I do not blame the present Minister for this—was not convinced until June, 1958, of the need for the expansion of teacher training colleges, and that was only 18 months ago. After he became convinced that a certain expansion was necessary, he decided on a figure of 12,000 against expert advice that the minimum figure should be 16,000.
I appealed to the then Minister not to close down the training college at Wrexham. After much pleading, both by correspondence and on the Floor of this Chamber, the college was given a reprieve for 10 years. Had my appeal not been successful, the college would have closed and our difficulties regarding teacher shortage would have been all the greater. Even now, it has become quite clear that there is a need for a further reprieve for this college. I ask the Minister to consider this point very carefully, because the temporary status of the college is resulting in staffing difficulties. Would it not be better to make the present temporary colleges permanent, before electing new colleges in different parts of the country? Such a procedure would, I believe, establish a


stability in our training college system from which we could expand much further.
Reference has been made in the debate more than once to the cutting back of programmes for the schools, the issuing by the Ministry from time to time of certain circulars in the name of economy. I am not concerned at the moment with the steps considered necessary in a period of financial crisis, but, when clearance of slum schools is postponed indefinitely in the name of economy, we are passing the burden of our difficulties on to our children—the innocent party. Most of those children were not born when the seeds of our difficulties were sown. It seems utterly wrong that because the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children's teeth should be set on edge.
Much as I dislike bipartisanship, there is much to be said for it in education, both within the Government and between the parties. By bipartisanship within the Government, I mean that there should be a firm understanding between the Minister of Education and the Treasury that when a programme of educational expansion has been announced and embarked on there can be no going back on that programme until it has been completed. By bipartisanship between the parties, I mean that if the implementation of an expanding educational programme is interrupted by a change of Government the change of Government should not mean the breaking down of that implementation of that expanding programme.
Had that been the policy in the past fifteen years, there would have been a steady and consistent advance. The black pages which still remain on our record—despite the fine glowing pages, of which I agree we can be proud— would have disappeared. In 1925–26, a national survey drew up what was called a black list of schools. In 1958, thirty-two years later, we had 549 of those schools on the list. I suggest that makes no sense in this enlightened age.
I want to say a word or two about the wide discrepancies between allowances made by different local authorities. First, I speak of allowances for books. The average allowance in county boroughs of England and Wales in 1958 was £1 5s. An average implies that some give more and some less, but what

of the range? The highest allowance was £1 10s., given by some authorities which are to be congratulated. Other authorities, however, granted only 7s. 6d. per child. I suggest that such authorities should be told to put their house in order. The average per county borough for furniture, apparatus and equipment was 11s. 6d. per child, so that a school of 100 pupils would get £55. That would not buy much when we bear in mind that Purchase Tax was included. Some authorities granted £1 10s., and they are to be congratulated, but others made a grant of only 2s. 9d. per child. That is a disgrace.
I could give further examples if necessary, but I now turn to the question of the inspectorate. I know that I am treading on rather thin ice here. During my long period in the schools my relationship with the inspectorate was one of unbroken happiness, understanding and co-operation. At all times I found them reasonable men and women. I am pleased to make that testimony here this afternoon, but, after long consideration, I think we need a radical change of outlook as to the function of the inspectorate. I have in mind, in particular, the practice of conducting a full-scale inspection of schools. A happy band of inspectors comes along. They sit in the classrooms, listen to the teacher and later, if necessary, submit his presentation to severe criticism.
Those teachers are qualified teachers and range from teachers in the infant schools to tutors in the technical and training colleges. Too often an inspector is listening to a teacher of higher academic qualification and a much greater wealth of teaching experience than the inspector himself. This can only be a hang-over from the "payment by results" period. Inspectors come and inspectors go. Before they arrive there is awe, and they certainly enjoy that, but when they have gone there is general relaxation, of which the inspectors are fully aware and about which they can do nothing at all. That is why I suggest that we require another look at the function of the inspectorate.
It might concentrate a little more on the books and equipment, the stationery and apparatus which become available to the teacher, a little more on the conditions of the buildings in which teacher


and taught have to carry out their work. They do that, of course, but I want them to do it more thoroughly. The inspectorate should inspect the local authorities as much as they inspect the teachers and, if the authorities fall short of the national average in regard to books, equipment and apparatus, the inspector should say so in no unmeasured terms. They should keep drawing attention to that until the authorities become more enlightened and mend their ways.
My time is up, and part of my "sermon" has to be thrown away. I am not making a party speech. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote:
To travel through one's ages is to take the heart of a liberal education.
Shakespeare wrote of the seven ages of man. A modern educationist will know that a child passes through many ages, differing in experience and in emphasis, during his school life. Each age must be lived to the full if he is to take the heart of a liberal education. That is the substance of this debate. We are dealing with the provisions for children who are blossoming forth to life. They are growing quickly and need all the fresh air, the sunshine, the light and the warmth of the amenities which can be provided.
They are active, fond of running, jumping, romping and moving about quickly. We know full well they are curbed in their natural expression by being confined to small classrooms and puny playgrounds. Many of these schools are in rural areas with miles of open meadow around them, but the children are confined to a high-walled playground 100 per cent. macadamised. It is a period of activity, and what child does not revel in paint, paint brushes, pencils and crayons—very often messy things? But what does that matter if it helps the child to travel through his ages and get the heart of a liberal education. Let us give the child the space, the equipment, the apparatus—the paint, the powder and the paper—for that is, I believe, the primary task of our primary education.

6.0 p.m.

Mr. James Watts: I wish to make just two important points. The first is the hardy annual which is now not controversial, that the arrangement made some time ago in relation to religious schools of a second-

ary type should be extended to primary schools. Secondly, teachers would be attracted to primary schools in very bad, slummy industrial areas—this occupies all my mind at present; I can think of nothing else—if houses could be built where they could live in comfort, going out warm and happy, having had a good night or a week of comfort at home. Very often at present teachers are able to find only very bad houses near their schools, and this makes it extremely difficult for them. I ask that consideration should be given to these two points.

6.1 p.m.

Dr. Horace King: I was delighted that the hon. Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings) was selected to open this short debate on behalf of the Government. He spoke, as always, with knowledge based on a lifetime of service in the primary schools. As one would expect, he vigorously emphasised what was right in post-war achievement, but it is the duty of the Opposition in this debate— as we have done—to point out to the Committee what yet remains to be done and how urgent this work is.
The impact of the Crowther Committee on'educational opinion and the Minister's own subsequent speeches, which have added their own vision of what can be done in education if Britain is willing to make the effort and the sacrifice, have won the present Minister golden opinions. The right hon. Gentleman now faces the formidable task of justifying those high opinions, of matching promise and performance.
I agree with a number of my hon. Friends who have pointed out that primary education has been the Cinderella of education ever since the Hadow Report. Most reorganisation of schools into secondary and primary has left the primary children in the old school buildings which are regarded as not good enough for secondary children. We have two nations in education, as we have often pointed out—those who go to private schools and those who go to State schools. We cannot do anything about that through this debate. However, it is also true to say that we have two nations in the State primary schools—those in the fine, modern buildings erected since the war and


those in the pre-1900 schools. As Dr. Ollerenshaw pointed out in 1954, 750,000 children are in schools built before 1870 and 2 million children are in schools built before 1903.
I serve on an education committee. Like most local education authorities, the members of my authority are working hard trying to improve the older primary schools in Hampshire as well as to build new ones. My authority has to overcome, as every local education authority has, a backlog of some 40 years' pre-war neglect of primary schools. Like all local education authorities, it has had to pay for the alternate spurt and cut policy which Tory Governments have pursued ever since 1951.
My authority has, however, nearly completed the first ten-year programme, which has brought water sanitation to more than half the 115 village schools in Hampshire which ten years ago had only bucket sanitation. As I regard the matter of sanitation as tremendously important and of vital importance to every village school in the country, I should like to quote a recent report of the Hampshire Medical Officer:
Increasing numbers of children on the roll of almost every school and the development of the school meals service have led to greater use of the toilets; the erection of school kitchens on congested sites has inevitably led to their being in close proximity to the sanitary blocks, enhancing the risk of contamination of food by flies; disposal of pail-contents becomes more difficult as sites become more congested; there is increasing difficulty in securing the standard of caretaking which is essential if chemical closets are to remain sanitary; parents are more hygiene-conscious; fewer children have pail-closets in their own homes; and diarrhoeal diseases are on the increase.
Therefore, the Minister ought to do all he can to support local authorities in getting rid of bad sanitation in village schools.
In the case of my own authority, the minor works programme, since the Minister increased the maximum figure —we are very grateful to the Minister for it—has been used to improve our worst village schools. But the backlog of which I spoke is revealed in report after report by Her Majesty's inspectors. I should like to quote from a report— I am not quoting from the N.U.T.'s excellent new pamphlet, as other

speakers have done, but from our own reports:
The original buildings, now used as cloakrooms, date from 1833—present classrooms were added at the beginning of the century. The interior is dingy. There is no staff-room …
Some day perhaps the teachers of this country will have the working conditions which the Factories Acts secure for factory workers.
…or storage space. The school has 226 pupils. For eight years the headmaster had to teach the top class.
I suggest that it is impossible for a headmaster to do the work that he has to do as headmaster if at the same time he has to be in full charge of a class. One of the two jobs suffers. This is a burning problem with heads of fairly small schools.
Conservatives are sometimes apt to be lyrical about the virtues of the small village schools. I still feel that a village child does not get a fair chance when competing for special places with children from the large new primary schools in the towns. Here is a picture of a three-class school, the ages ranging from 5 to 11. I quote Her Majesty's inspector's report again:
In all three schools the children have a wide range of ability and of age, and the staff have to face the problem of providing sufficient stimulus to extend the brightest child and at the same time give the less able children the individual attention they require.
Some village school teachers are geniuses who can do that, but I suggest that the task is beyond the compass of many.
There are thousands of rural primary schools with only two classes—one for children aged 5 to 7, one for those aged 8 to 11. The hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Scott-Hopkins), who spoke about the one-teacher school, might be interested to know that Hampshire is sending peripatetic full-time teachers round to ease the burden of the teachers in one-teacher and two-teacher schools. Sometimes these schools do not even have a room for each of the two classes. I give another quotation from Her Majesty's inspector's report:
Ninety-eight children in three classes, one of which is housed very inconveniently in a converted corridor.
I wish I could convey to the Committee the contrast between that kind of depressing report and reports either on


new primary schools—bursting with activity and sense of purpose—or even on old schools which have been made more beautiful by minor works and improvements, such as fresh colours, a piano that really plays music—I would suggest that the Minister, if he is keen on music, might some day persuade local education authorities to destroy half the unmusical pianos which were supplied to schools before the war—a kitchen dining room, an extra classroom, hot water, a decent lavatory and wash basins, or cloakrooms where the children can dry their coats on wet days.
Even a little prefabricated school can work miracles in a village. I quote an inspector's report again:
A school stood beside the Test since 1837. Last year the original building was demolished and within a few weeks a spacious and elegant two-classroom structure arose on the same site. A very real fillip has been given to the morale of the staff and children by the bright new building.
If that is true, the converse is also true. Bad accommodation makes it difficult to get good teachers, or even teachers who will stay in a school. It is in the poor school that one will find the supply teacher, the temporary teacher, the person that one had to get merely because one had to have someone to put in front of the class.
One such village school in my area had three new teachers within one year. It was no wonder. The school had two classes in one room with a screen down the middle. It is not only the village that has the old primary school. Some of my hon. Friends have mentioned the squalid town primary school. Even a progressive town like my own town of Southampton has one such school in my own ward—St. Denys School. There is another not far away, Bitterne Church of England School. Not far away is Fremantle Church of England School. They are all cramped on a tiny site which does not conform to any regulation, possibly not even to the building regulations of 1902. They are old buildings almost incapable of improvement.
I appreciate what has been done by this and previous Governments, but my fifteen years on a primary committee have shown me just how much still remains to be done. The simple fact is that we should have been running a £70 million building programme year by year

for the last ten years. The experts told Mr. Tomlinson that back in 1946 or 1947. Instead, this Government have moved by fits and starts—up and down. This year nearly every local education authority, after carefully choosing the most urgent of all the schools that it needs, major and minor programmes, find its programmes cut by the Minister. I reiterate that no education committee lightly shoves a list of schools up to the Ministry of Education Every authority prunes carefully.

Mr. A. Bourne-Arton: Will not the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Dr. King) agree that there were certain fits and starts before 1951?

Dr. King: I am trying to deal with facts. If the hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Bourne-Arton) wants a party political debate, he can have one. When it came into power in 1945, the Labour Party had to start with a country which was impoverished by war, without a single plan, without a scrap of preparation on the building programmes to be undertaken in schools. It went steadily on—

Mr. Bourne-Arton: The hon. Gentleman condemned the Conservative Government for their policy of fits and starts. I ask him to agree that that was not peculiar to one form of Government.

Dr. King: The hon. Gentleman must take my answer even if he does not understand it. I said that the Labour Party had to start from the beginning, and we steadily built up. If he looks at the building programmes started under the Labour Government, he will find that that held true until 1951 when the programme was approaching the £70 million figure I mentioned.

Mr. F. H. Hayman: Will my hon. Friend take into account that all through this century every Conservative Government have moved up and down by fits and starts in education?

Dr. King: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that reminder. Overcrowded schools, a shortage of architects in the public service, building labourers out of work, and a plethora of office building in the City of London, are the


characteristic products of private enterprise and Conservative policy.
A primary school needs a staff room for the staff, a school hall where the act of worship and the school assembly can take place, a gym, dining facilities, a craft room, a library, adequate playgrounds and playing fields, and an adequate capitation allowances for books and stationery. Even some of the newest primary schools have not the full list of these amenities which I regard as essential.
Bad buildings are bad enough, but shortage of teachers is even worse. First let me again quote to the Committee:
I want first to ask the Minister whether his plans for increasing the number of teachers are sufficiently ambitious to cope with this problem … when we reflect upon the conditions which exist in these over-numerous classes we must realise that a teacher is not a teacher but a circus-master to keep children in order. Proper education cannot be conducted in these circumstances."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 4th May. 1950; Vol. 474, c. 1911.]
They are wise words. They were said by the present Home Secretary in 1950 when he was girding at the late Mr. Tomlinson.
Two years later the Tories were in power and the first Tory Minister of Education addressed herself to the same problem in these words:
 …on the advice and facts given to me we cannot hope for an improvement in the size of our classes until the numbers of the children begin to go down after 1961. I think that is a dreadful thing."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th March. 1952; Vol. 498, c. 234.]
It was dreadful. It was so dreadful that the Minister, instead of doing anything about it, was at that moment introducing the now notorious economy cuts of that years.
For several years progress was halted. There were no more new training colleges. This was not for lack of advice. The OFFICIAL REPORT shows that the Opposition, and my hon. Friend the Member for Fulham (Mr. M. Stewart) in particular, again and again asked for action to produce more teachers. The Minister's own Advisory Council urged a 16,000 expansion in teacher training places. The teaching profession—the A.E.C., outstanding men like Sir Ronald Gould and Dr. Alexander—all pointed out to this Minister's predecessor that this was a minimum figure, especially when one

realised that in 1962 the three-year teacher training would begin.
The Government tardily made provision for 12,000 new places long after the short-fall in extra teachers had become patent, and then, again too late, made this a crash programme in which— may I interpolate—everybody, especially the training colleges, have co-operated magnificently. Finally, again late in the day, the present Minister added the extra 4,000 which had been demanded two years before.
We cannot, however, feel the benefit of this expansion for several years. When the new teachers come out of the training colleges, most of them will be secondary school teachers. We are faced with a grave shortage of science masters and handicraft teachers and, contrary to what some people anticipated, of primary teachers. I believe that that shortage of primary teachers in the few years ahead of us is as important as that of the others I mentioned.
Moreover, as some of us pointed out years ago, the first bulge was followed by a second bulge—not so big as the first bulge, but bigger than anything which took place before the war. It shows no signs of declining. The latest birth rate figures are higher than any post-war year except three. They may still go up higher.
Today, although the position has eased —the hon. Member for Burton told us how much it had eased—primary schools are still overcrowded. Today teachers are rationed by a quota system. I believe that is right. As long as there is a shortage, as long as there are grim areas like Birmingham, it is fair; it is good for teachers; it is good for education authorities, and it is good for children, that we should ration teachers who are in short supply.

Mr. Hayman: Will my hon. Friend take into account that Birmingham has been satisfied to some extent at the expense of counties like Cornwall, where nearly 200 of our 300 primary schools have less than 100 children on the books?

Dr. King: Yes. I admit that there are difficulties in the application of the quota system. I cannot pretend to deal with that special aspect of it, although I sympathise with what my hon. Friend has said and with what the hon. Member


for Cornwall, North said on the same issue. The existence of many small schools throws any quota out of balance.
Today every education officer looks ahead with foreboding to 1962, the year when there will be not an increase, but for that year a decrease, in the number of teachers. My friend the Chief Education Officer for Southampton, Mr. Freeman, whom I mention in this debate because this year he ends a distinguished career of service to education in my town, talked ominously to me a few weeks ago of the possibility of half-time coming back to some schools. I do not believe that it will. I believe that that is an over-pessimistic picture. However, we are in for a hard time. That hard time will be nearly as serious in primary as in secondary education. We must remember that on primary education we build in time the superstructure that Crowther and the Minister dream of.
As it is, today some primary schools are kept going by the employment of unqualified teachers. This year there is again a short-fall in the number of extra teachers. This year, as last year, hundreds of young men and women who wished to enter training colleges and are fit to be there were turned down.
Old annual reports of the Ministry of Education make very sad reading today. At page 3 of the 1949 Annual Report the experts demanded that the teaching force be raised to 240,000 by 1954. It fell short of that figure by 7,500. Yet the Report for 1954 says at page 11:
There should be a good prospect of reducing nearly all primary classes by 1961 at least, to the regulation size of 40 children or less ".
But, in 1961, as the hon. Member for Burton has really confirmed, one-quarter of all our primary children will still be in oversize classes. Moreover, we now know that the 240,000 target for the teaching profession is nearly 100,000 short of the number that we shall actually need.
Today, therefore, the Opposition, looking back over ten years, condemns the Government for their failure to be sufficiently seized of the problem of teacher supply until a few months ago. Britain now pays for 40 years' neglect of primary schools. It pays for the economy cuts of 1951, of 1956 and of 1958, and it pays for successive

Ministers' failure both to plan and to lead.
The primary school teachers have indeed borne the brunt of the post-war burden. Despite handicaps, some of which I have mentioned, finer work has been done in the primary school than ever before. A simple example—and I was pleased to hear it referred to earlier in the debate—is that fewer children than ever before leave primary schools today unable to read comfortably and happily. The progress we have made in primary education matches that which we have made in secondary education. We still have, however, some all-age primary schools, and I plead with the Minister to get rid of the last of the all-age schools in this country so that all primary education may be in primary schools and all secondary education in secondary schools and both benefit.
The root problem that we face today, as everyone realises, is the supply of teachers. We need long-term solutions, and the Minister has already made those plans. We also need immediate—I would say, almost desperate—remedies. The Minister must do something to get into the training colleges those youngsters turned down by training colleges but capable of becoming teachers. For the immediate period ahead we must also recruit back all those who have been teachers and are capable of helping the country in this moment of need.
I urge the right hon. Gentleman to call together his advisers, with the Association of Education Committees and representatives of the teaching profession, to devise means of coping with the crisis of 1962. Even more, I would urge him to use every scrap of his undoubted ability and drive to speed up the training-college programmes and get them—to borrow a metaphor from industry—into full production as soon as possible.
We have heard this Minister speak in this House, in the country and on the radio; if he can now match those fine words with deeds, if he can convince his colleagues this time—as both he and Lord Hailsham failed to do in the past—really to carry the financial burden of expanding the teaching service to get the size of classes down—and of doing so rapidly—then, indeed, he will leave his


mark on educational history and, not the least, on the primary schools.
For the past fifteen years in speeches in the country I have been quoting a passage strangely noble for a technical document. In Building Bulletin No. 1, 1949, one reads:
Children of primary school age are growing quickly. Therefore, they need plenty of fresh air, sunshine, warmth, light and good food.
They delight in free movement, and are active, inquisitive and often boisterous and noisy. Therefore, the school needs to provide uncrowded space, and opportunities for making and doing.
They sometimes like to be quiet. Therefore, the school should provide the right kind of space in which small groups of children may rest quietly.
I believe that that will be when they are very, very tired, indeed:
They are intensely interested in the material objects around them. Therefore, they should be surrounded with good colours, shapes, forms, and textures, and will thus grow to understand beauty and simplicity.
This last is pure Plato in a Government circular. I would add that they need— in their infinite range of abilities, interests, problems, home backgrounds —skilled teachers and small classes, so that education can be, in every primary school an individual matter.
When all is said, when the Ministers and the officials, the captains and the kings depart, when even the headmaster departs, we are left with the classroom, the class teacher and the children. This Minister's task is to provide enough decent and beautiful classrooms, to provide enough teachers, and enough qualified teachers, so that every child in the land shall receive the primary education he deserves. The goals are precise and firm. We need 60,000 teachers to get down the size of the classes to that required by the regulations. If we can bend the nation's will to that, then indeed towards the end of this decade we may proceed to the second goal, and raise the school leaving age to 16.

6.27 p.m.

The Minister of Education (Sir David Eccles): The speech that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Dr. King) well illustrates what a good thing it is that the Opposition chose a debate on primary education. I would like to thank

the hon. Gentleman very much, because there is obviously so much to be said both about the successes of the primary schools today and what still wants doing. Almost every speech today has shown an appreciation both of the post-war progress and of the great task that we still have to bring our primary schools to the standards we wish.
I agree very much with my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge (Mr. Hornby) when he said that in the last few years, or, at any rate, quite recently, circumstances have contrived to concentrate the limelight on the secondary schools. The post-war bulge in the birth rate, moving out of the primary schools into the secondary schools, compelled the Minister and the local education authorities to increase the emphasis on the provision of buildings and teachers for the secondary schools. That was quite inevitable.
Then came the Crowther Report, which made insistent claims that the reforms and improvements in the secondary schools were urgently necessary and that we must pay attention to them. Very naturally, educational comment has been largely taken up in recent months with the Crowther Report. The Albemarle Report dealt with teenagers, and the Anderson Report, which is to come, deals with the problem of the 18-plus.
I feel, therefore, that the House has rightly shown a good deal of sympathy with the primary schools at a time when current discussion and administrative anxiety are strongly focussed on the secondary stage of education, but I can assure hon. Members that in the Ministry and in the local authorities we have always worked to a consistent plan for all stages of education. I am glad of the debate, as it gives just the opportunity that I was looking for to show how that plan has taken shape, and how I hope that it will continue.
We have always known—and there is no doubt about it in any hon. Member's mind—that the primary schools are the foundation of the whole edifice of formal education. If the infants and junior schools are not given the facilities to do their job well, the money and effort spent on the further stages of secondary education will, to some considerable extent, be wasted. Educationally, the primaries are first in order of time, and in no sense second in order of importance.
I was very interested in what the hon. Member for Wigan (Mr. Fitch) said. He made a point that has often occurred to me, that the primary schools, quite apart from purely educational considerations, make a unique contribution to the esteem in which the whole system of maintained schools is held. When a child first goes to school at the age of five the parents, or, at any rate, the mother, feels that that is a very serious event of quite exceptional importance to the child and to herself. One knows the kind of questions that she asks: will the child settle down quickly? Will the child be happy and get on well?
The answer to those anxious questions must have a lasting effect upon the respect and esteem in which the whole public system of education is held. Therefore, if it could be fairly claimed that primary schools were not getting their share of the resources available, that would be very damaging to the children and would be a cause of special anxiety to the parents. I am glad, therefore, to have the opportunity to dispel any apprehensions on that score.
I will begin briefly by describing the primary schools as they are in England and Wales today. There are 4 million children between the ages of five and 11 in a little over 20,000 schools, being taught by about 143,000 teachers. That is a large number of teachers; in comparison, it is seven times the total number of general medical practitioners in the country. Of those 143,000, 110,000 are women. It is, therefore, in these schools that the rapid turnover in staff due to early marriage is most keenly felt, and that is a point to which I will return in a moment.
There is, therefore, no doubt at all that the primary schools, by their function and size, have a very large and important place in the life of the community, and it is disturbing to hear it said that they are doing badly in comparison with secondary schools in such matters as building and staff. I think that the background to this feeling that they are not doing so well lies in the moving bulge in the birth-rate, and that is now passing to the secondary schools, as I shall describe.
I should like to go back a little and deal with the position as it was when the Act was passed in 1944. My right

hon. Friend the Home Secretary, when he introduced his Measure, said that it would take a generation to carry out. That has often been quoted, especially now when we are fifteen years from the passage of the Act, or half way through a generation of thirty years. The fact is that in 1944 my right hon. Friend could know nothing about the post-war bulge in the birth-rate. It had not occurred. Still less could he know anything about a second rise in the birth-rate which has been taking place recently. His estimate that it would take thirty years to implement the Act was based on 5¼ million children in school.
If that number had remained constant during these fifteen years, and if Governments had spent on education as much as we have spent, I think that there is little doubt that by now the Act would have been fulfilled—not in a generation, but in half a generation. But what is the school population today? It is not 5 million children, but 7 million. As several hon. Members have said, this huge increase first made itself felt in the primary schools. There were in 1947, for example, 400,000 more live births than in 1938. Therefore, in 1952 there were about—not exactly—400,000 more five-year-olds than there had been in 1938. For that reason the school building programme, after the war, had first to be directed to putting roofs over this advancing army of five-year-olds.
The demand for new schools, as the Committee knows, was greater than the numbers alone since we had to deal with movements of the population. The flow of families to new towns and housing estates always poses a very difficult problem, if only for the reason that it takes longer to plan and build schools than it does to erect houses. We have a good record compared with other industrialised countries, most of whom also had a postwar rise in the birth rate. We have not had children out of school; neither have we had children taught in shifts. I believe it is correct to say that in almost every other industrialised country one or other of those unfortunate things has occurred.
Our building policy has been consistent. During the last eight years nearly I million new primary school places have been provided, and almost as many secondary school places. But as the


primary bulge came first, so did primary school building. In the first four years of the last eight, two-thirds of the new places were primary and in the second four years only two-fifths.

Mr. Hayman: Would the Minister say what proportion of the new places provided in primary schools was in new towns and new housing estates, as compared with other areas?

Sir D. Eccles: Not unless I made an exceedingly difficult calculation. It would be very difficult to draw such a distinction between new towns and housing estates, and other areas. I will try, and if I can I will send the information to the hon. Gentleman.
The hon. Member for Itchen rightly drew our attention to the problem of reorganisation. In 1954, I started a programme of rural reorganisation, and I am sorry, as all Members are, that economic circumstances prevented that going straight through. I had hoped that in five years it would be completed in the rural areas. There were then 240,000 senior pupils in unreorganised schools. Today, there are 100,000, and according to the 1958 White Paper all these will be in secondary schools within the five years. The total cost of reorganisation in the whole of England and Wales is about £40 million, and two-thirds of this sum was included in the first two years of the present five year programme. That is not bad going. Most of the remainder is in a few especially difficult areas.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) drew attention to the difficulties in his county. The actual figures are not bad. At the beginning of 1959, 58 all-age schools were in service in the County of Cornwall. At the beginning of 1960, there were only 33. Every one of these 33 schools will be reorganised when this year's building programme is completed. That is a major change for the better.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) referred to the problem of reorganisation in his county. It is about the worst in the whole country. I do not know the reason for that but, if I remember aright, I think the county council has been fairly consistently in the hands of one political party. There are at present 91 all-age departments in

Durham. Of those, 49 will be reorganised by building projects in the first two years of the five-year programme, and the other 42 should be dealt with in the subsequent three years of the programme.
I cannot say exactly when all the 42 will be reorganised, but we very much hope that the hon. Gentleman's date, 1968, will prove to be pessimistic. I undertake to put pressure upon this programme because I entirely agree with what he said; so long as there are over-11s in the same school as infants and juniors, we cannot say that we are carrying out the fundamental purposes of the 1944 Act. I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cornwall, North that we need the same standards in rural areas as in the towns. We are working towards that.
A good deal was said, quite rightly, about the unsatisfactory condition of some primary schools. At the end of the war, there were many thousands of primary schools in a very bad state. None of us denies that. Nearly all of them, I think, would have been put right by now if we had not first had to build new schools for the growing number of children. A vast proportion of the £700 million spent on school building since the war has been directed simply to increasing the number of schools. Had that money gone towards replacing and improving old schools, a very different picture would now be seen.
Local authorities, too, particularly in their finance committees, no doubt, were understandably unwilling to spend money improving out-of-date schools which they had planned to demolish and rebuild within a short time. Their plans were thrown out of gear, just as the Ministry's plans were thrown out of gear, by the unexpected increase in school population. They had to delay these replacements in favour of additions to the total number of schools, and this delay, very naturally, has caused much criticism and increased the demand for improvement. I am sure that every hon. Member will agree that, every time a new school is opened in his constituency, the contrast between it and the bad schools which still exist in the neighbourhood is stronger than ever. That is inevitable. It is a good thing, because it keeps up the pressure for continuing the programme.
Since most of the improvements to primary schools which were very much the subject of the speech of the hon. Member for Rossendale (Mr. Greenwood) as he spoke about various definite needs are done under the minor works programme, it is worth noting the difference between the minor works programme before we came into power and the minor works programme now. The last full calendar year of the Labour Government was 1950, and the money allocated to the minor works programme of that year was £7·3 million. It is now £18 million. It so happens that in the first quarter of this year precisely £7·3 million has been started. It is certainly fair to say that the minor works programme has been very substantially increased; it is now two and a half times greater than it was. However, it was a great source of anxiety to me when I was last at the Ministry that we could not go further ahead, and it still is.
I can record some excellent progress in installing electric light, sanitation, accommodation for school dinners, playing fields, and so forth. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Mr. Jennings), whose speech I listened to with great interest; I do not think that the National Union of Teachers' pamphlet gave quite a fair picture, but I can easily overlook that in gratitude to its authors for having brought the problem to our attention. If we are to have the resources we need for improving all our schools, quite clearly we must keep up the pressure.
I can give one or two examples, which could easily be multiplied, of what has been achieved. In Berkshire, ten years ago, there were 230 primary schools, of which 100 had no water-borne sanitation. Today, this 100 has been reduced to 50, and the authority expects to tackle all the remainder in the next few years. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, ten years ago—this is really a shocking figure—out of 210 primary schools 150 had no modern sanitation. One hundred and fifteen have been modernised and 11 more will be during the coming year. In other words, they are well on the way through the programme.
I was much interested in what the hon. Member for Itchen had to say about Hampshire schools.

Mr. A. V. Hilton: Can the Minister give us any figures about Norfolk primary schools, before he leaves the subject of sanitation and so forth?

Sir D. Eccles: I have not got those figures here, but I will send them to the hon. Member. I interviewed representatives of the Norfolk authority recently about their capital works programme and I know how anxious they are to get on.

Mr. Hilton: I am sorry that the Minister cannot give us any figures—

The Chairman: If the Minister does not give way, the hon. Member must resume his seat.

Sir D. Eccles: As far as we can, we shall increase the minor works programme. But there is a practical difficulty here. As hon. Members will know, minor works are very time-consuming for architects and their staffs. It would be wrong to prejudice the new school building programme, especially at this time when it is so much larger than ever before.
The kind of criticism that the hon. Member for Rossendale and his hon. Friends launch about local authority programmes being cut is really not valid. What happened was something like this. A boy might have been given 5s. by his uncle at Christmas time. He goes to his uncle and asks for 10s. on the next occasion. His uncle says, "I am sorry, but you can have only 7s. 6d." The boy then goes home and tells his mother that his money has been cut. That is exactly the kind of thing which has happened. The major programme for school building is, in fact, 20 per cent. greater than it has ever been before. To describe that as a cut is really to make a rather curious use of words.
I come now to staffing in the primary schools. This is of vital importance to the whole education service. When the bulge moved out of the primary schools, we had to encourage the transfer of some teachers to the secondary schools. That period is over. But, in spite of all our efforts to obtain teachers for the secondary schools, there has been a small deterioration in secondary school staffing standards, while there has been an improvement in the primary schools. Between 1953 and 1959, the average size


of class in the primaries has been reduced from 36 to 33. The proportion of pupils in oversize classes has dropped from nearly a half to under a quarter, and this improvement continues through 1959. I wish secondary schools had as good a report.
We could, of course, make much better progress in the next few years were it not for the introduction of the three-year training course. But I am sure that that decision was right, although, temporarily, we must pay a very high price for it. I agree, therefore, with all hon. Members who have said that we must recruit teachers in every possible way we can. That is our plan. The expansion of teacher training colleges is a very big operation since one has not only to consider where they should be, but how to staff them, what should be the right relationship with the universities and what should be done about the third year course. It is a very big operation, but I treat it, I might almost say, as the number one job to be done in the next few years. I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Moss Side (Mr. Watts) was on a good point when he said that in certain areas it would assist if the local authority would help in providing housing. It is quite an inducement, and it is one which I tried to push forward when I was at the Ministry last time.
I must take up what my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland said about class sizes in primary schools. That regulation figure of 40 maximum, as against 30 in secondary schools, is a symbol to many of the lower esteem in which teaching juniors, quite wrongly, is thought to be held in official circles. The fact is that this question of maximum class sizes has not been a practical one in recent years. We have been too busy trying to keep pace with the school population and improve standards all round. Classes in primary schools now average 33, against 36 a few years ago, and that 33 today compares with 30 in the secondary schools, so that there is not a tremendous different at present.
I would agree with the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland and say that, personally, I have yet to discover any logical reason for considering that it is easier to teach a large class in a primary school

than it is in a secondary school. I suppose there must have been some reason behind this figure; the right hon. Member for South Shields accepted it, and he must have known what it was for. I feel that we ought to examine the whole position again and that is what we intend to do.
When one goes into an infants' school today, where modern methods of teaching are being employed, and I agree with other hon. Members who have said this, we get a feeling of tremendous success and wonderful enthusiasm on the part of the teachers. There is no low morale in our primary schools; on the contrary, the teachers are on their toes. One sees these rooms, in which the children are not sitting in the old serried ranks as they used to do, but are grouped round tables, perhaps six or eight in a group, according to their ability in a particular subject, and the teacher circulating between them, giving them advice, tidying them up when they need it, and generally doing a wonderful individual job.
It is absolutely clear that if we have so many children in that class that we have to have these tables so close together that the teacher cannot get round them, modern methods fall to the ground. On this point, I agree that we have to do our very best to see that the great advances made in teaching these small children are open to all schools.
I cannot enter tonight into a discussion of the point raised by the hon. Member for Wigan about streaming. I think that that is a matter which the teaching profession must work out for itself, though what the hon. Gentleman said was very interesting, and I entirely agree that the primary schools handbook which the Ministry recently published is a very good piece of work.
I will now try to answer one or two questions which I was asked. The hon. Member for Wrexham (Mr. Idwal Jones) asked me about a training college which is a temporary college, with a temporary life. I cannot give him the answer today, but we certainly intend to increase the teacher training college provision in that part of the country. Exactly where it will be and how we can best make a permanent college I cannot yet tell him, but we will do our best. I was asked why we had not proceeded with these plans for teacher training colleges before.
One reason for that is from the 1950s until quite recently, it has been very hard to fill all the places we have had with candidates of suitable quality. From the experience we have had, it was not until quite recently that, I am very glad to say, we have had a good increase in the number of men candidates coming forward, as well as girls, and we have been able to choose a little between the candidates presenting themselves.
Finally, I should like to draw attention to the fact that we are exhibiting in Milan a primary school built by the consortium in the Midlands which has done such good work. This will be on view at the Triennale, which is the great exhibition of design. So well-known was British school-building after the war that we were specially asked by the organisers of that exhibition to do this, and I have no doubt at all that this school which we are building there will be seen by more than half a million people, and will be a very fine symbol of the efforts that have been made by various Governments since the war to

build up the techniques of our school building. I hope that if any hon. Members are in Italy during the summer, they will go there, because we are making every possible effort to show this really worthy exhibit.

The 20,000 primary schools and the 4 million children in them will never be forgotten in the Ministry of Education or by the local authorities, and I can think of nothing better than to be the Minister of Education at the end of this decade, when the teachers will be available, and then be able to decide, as no Minister of Education since the war has been able to decide, where he should best use this freedom which he will have, after such a long period of simply chasing school numbers.

Mr. Greenwood: I beg to move, That Item Class IV, Vote I (Ministry of Education), be reduced by £5.

Question put:—

The Committee divided: Ayes 175, Noes 240.

Division No. 80.]
AYES
[6.58 p.m.


Ainsley, William
Ginsburg, David
McInnes, James


Albu, Austen
Goooh, E. G.
McKay, John (Wallsend)


Allen, Soholefield (Crewe)
Gordon Walker, Rt. Hn. P. C.
Mackie, John


Bacon, Miss Alice
Greenwood, Anthony
McLeavy, Frank


Baird, John
Grey, Charles
Mahon, Simon


Baxter, William (Stirlingshire, W.)
Griffiths, Rt. Hon. James (Llanelly)
Mallalieu, E. L. (Brigg)


Bellenger, Rt. Hon. F. J.
Griffiths, W. (Exchange)
Mallalieu, J.P.W.(Huddersfield,E.)


Benn, Hn.A.Wedgwood (Brist'l, S.E.)
Gunter, Ray
Manuel, A. C.


Benson, Sir George
Hall, Rt. Hon. Glenvil (Colne Valley)
Mapp, Charles


Blackburn, F.
Hamilton, William (West Fife)
Mason, Roy


Bowden, Herbert w. (Leics, S.W.)
Hannan, William
Mellish, R. J.


Bowles, Frank
Hart, Mrs. Judith
Mendelson, J. J.


Boyden, James
Hayman, F. H.
Millan, Bruce


Brook way, A. Fenner
Healey, Denis
Mitchison, G. R.


Brown, Rt. Hon. George (Belper)
Herbison, Miss Margaret
Monslow, Walter


Butler, Herbert (Hackney, C.)
Hilton, A. V.
Moody, A. S.


Butler, Mrs. Joyce (Wood Green)
Holman, Percy
Morris, John


Callaghan, James
Howell, Charles A.
Mulley, Frederick


Castle, Mrs. Barbara
Hughes, Emrys (S. Ayrshire)
Neal, Harold


Chapman, Donald
Hughes, Hector (Aberdeen, N.)
Noel-Baker, Francis (Swindon)


Cliffe, Michael.
Hunter, A. E.
Oliver, G. H.


Corbet, Mrs. Freda
Hynd, H. (Accrington)
Oram, A. E.


Craddook, George (Bradford, S.)
Irvine, A. J. (Edge Hill)
Oswald, Thomas


Crosland, Anthony
Irving, Sydney (Dartford)
Owen, Will


Davies,Rt.Hn.Clement (Montgomery)
Janner, Barnett
Padley, W E.


Davies, C. Elfed (Rhondda, E.)
Jay, Rt. Hon. Douglas
Paget, R. T.


Davies, Harold (Leek)
Jeger, George
Pannell, Charles (Leeds, W.)


Davies, Ifor (Gower)
Johnson, Carol (Lewisham, S.)
Parker, John (Dagenham)


Davies, S.O. (Merthyr)
Jones, Rt. Hn. A. Creech(Wakefield)
Parkin, B. T, (Paddington, N.)


Deer, George
Jones, Dan (Burnley)
Paton, John


de Freitas, Geoffrey
Jones, Elwyn (West Ham, S.)
Pavitt, Laurence


Dempsey, James
Jones, J. Idwal (Wrexham)
Pearson, Arthur (Pontypridd)


Donnelly, Desmond
Kenyon, Clifford
Peart, Frederick


Driberg, Tom
Key, Rt. Hon. C. W.
Pentland, Norman


Ede, Rt. Hon. Chuter
King, Dr. Horace
Plummer, Sir Leslie


Edwards, Robert (Bilston)
Lawson, George
Prentice, R. E.


Edwards, Walter (Stepney)
Ledger, Ron
Price, J. T. (Westhoughton)


Evans, Albert
Lee, Frederick (Newton)
Probert, Arthur


Fernyhough, E.
Lewis, Arthur (West Ham. N.)
Proctor, W. T.


Fitoh, Alan
Logan, David
Pursey, Cmdr. Harry


Fletcher, Eric
Loughlin, Charles
Randall, Harry


Foot, Dingle
Mabon, Dr. J. Dickson
Rankin, John


Fraser, Thomas (Hamilton)
McCann, John
Rhodes, H.


Gaitskell, Rt. Hon. Hugh
MacColl, James
Robens, Rt. Hon. Alfred




Roberts, Albert (Normanton)
Strachey, Rt. Hon. John
Wells, Percy (Faversham)


Robinson, Kenneth (St. Pancras, N.)
Stross,Dr.Barnett(Stoke-on-Trent,C.)
Wells, William (Walsall, N.)


Rogers, C. H. R. (Kensington, N.)
Summerskill, Dt. Rt. Hon. Edith
Wheeldon, W. E.


Ross, William
Swain, Thomas
White, Mrs. Eirene


Shinwell, Rt. Hon. E.
Swingler, Stephen
Whitlock, William


Short, Edward
Sylvester, George
Wigg, George


Skeffington, Arthur
Symonds, J. B.
Wilkins, W. A.


Slater Mrs. Harriet (Stoke, N.)
Taylor, Bernard (Mansfield)
Willey, Frederick


Slater, Joseph (Sedgefield)
Taylor John (West Lothian)
Williams, D. J. (Neath)


Snow, Julian
Thornton, Ernest
Williams, Rev. LI. (Abertillery)


Sorensen, R. W.
Thorpe, Jeremy
Williams, W. R. (Openshaw)


Soskice, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank
Ungoed-Thomas, Sir Lynn
Woof, Robert


Spriggs, Leslie
Wainwright Edwin
Yates, Victor (Ladywood)


Stewart, Michael (Fulham)
Warbey, William



Stones, William
Weitzman, David
TELLERS FOR THE AYES:




Dr. Brougbton and Mr. Redhead.




NOES


Agnew, Sir Peter
Farr, John
Loveys, Walter H.


Allason, James
Fell, Anthony
Low, Rt. Hon. Sir Toby


Alport, C. J. M.
Finlay, Graeme
Lucas-Tooth, Sir Hugh


Amory,Rt.Hn.D.Heathcoat (Tiv'tn)
Fisher, Nigel
McAdden, Stephen


Arbuthnot, John
Forrest, George
MacArthur, lan


Ashton, Sir Hubert
Fraser, Ian (Plymouth, Sutton)
McLaren, Martin


Atkins, Humphrey
Freeth, Denzil
Macleod, Rt. Hn. lain (Enfield, W.)


Barber, Anthony
Gammans, Lady
McMaster, Stanley R.


Barlow, Sir John
Gardner, Edward
Macmillan, Rt. Hn. Harold (Bromley)


Barter, John
George, J. C. (Pollok)
Macpherson, Niall (Dumfries)


Batsford, Brian
Gibson-Watt, David
Maddan, Martin


Baxter, Sir Beverley (Southgate)
Glover, Sir Douglas
Maitland, Cdr. J. W.


Beamish, Col. Tufton
Glyn, Dr. Alan (Clapham)
Markham, Major Sir Frank


Bell, Ronald (S. Bucks.)
Goodhew, Victor
Marples, Rt. Hon. Ernest


Bennett, Dr. Reginald (Gos &amp; Fhm)
Gower, Raymond
Marten, Neil


Berkeley, Humphry
Grant, Rt. Hon. William (Woodside)
Matthews, Gordon (Meriden)


Bidgood, John C.
Green, Alan
Mawby, Ray


Biggs-Davison, John
Gresham Cooke, R.
Maydon, Lt.-Cmdr. S. L. C.


Bingham, R. M.
Grimston, Sir Robert
Mills, Stratton


Birch, Rt. Hon. Nigel
Grosvenor, Lt.-Col. R. G.
Montgomery, Fergus


Bishop, F. P.
Hall, John (Wycombe)
Morrison, John


Bossom, Clive
Hamilton, Michael (Wellingborough)
Mott-Radclyffe, Sir Charles


Bourne-Arton, A.
Harris, Frederic (Croydon, N.W.)
Nabarro, Gerald


Box, Donald
Harris, Reader (Heston)
Neave, Airey


Boyle, Sir Edward
Harrison, Brian (Maldon)
Nicholson, Sir Godfrey


Braine, Bernard
Harrison, Col. J. H. (Eye)
Noble, Michael


Bromley-Davenport, Lt.-Col. W. H.
Harvey, John (Walthamstow, E.)
Nugent, Sir Richard


Brooman-White, R
Hay, John
Oakshott, Sir Hendrie


Browne, Percy (Torrington)
Hill, Dr. Rt. Hon. Charles (Luton)
Ormsby-Gore, Rt. Hon. D.


Bullard, Denys
Hill, J. E. B. (S. Norfolk)
Orr, Capt. L. P. S.


Bullus, Wing-Commander Eric
Hinchingbrooke, Viscount
Orr-Ewing, C. Ian


Burden, F. A.
Hirst, Geoffrey
Osborne, Cyril (Louth)


Butcher, Sir Herbert
Hobson, John
Page, A. J. (Harrow, West)


Butler,Rt. Hn. R.A. (Saffron Walden)
Holland, Philip
Page, Graham


Carr, Compton (Barons Court)
Hollingworth, John
Pannell, Norman (Kirkdale)


Cary, Sir Robert
Hornby, R. P.
Partridge, E.


Channon, H. P. G.
Howard, Gerald (Cambridgeshire)
Peel, John


Chataway, Christopher
Howard, Hon, C. B. (St. lves)
Percival, Ian


Clark, Henry (Antrim, N.)
Howard, John (Southampton, Test)
Pickthorn, Sir Kenneth


Clark, William (Nottingham, S.)
Hughes-Young, Michael
Pitman, I. J.


Clarke, Brig, Terence (Portsmth, W.)
Hurd, Sir Anthony
pitt, Miss Edith


Cleaver, Leonard
Hutchison, Michael Clark
Pott, Percivall


Cole, Norman
Iremonger, T. L.
Powell, J. Enoch


Collard, Richard
Irvine, Bryant Godman (Rye)
Price, David (Eastleigh)


Cooke, Robert
James, David
Prior, J. M. L.


Cooper, A. E.
Jenkins, Robert (Dulwich)
Prior-Palmer, Brig. Sir Otho


Cooper-Key, Sir Neill
Jennings, J. C.
Proudfoot, Wilfred


Cordeaux, Lt.-Col. J. K
Johnson, Dr. Donald (Carlisle)
Ramsden, James


Corfield, F. V.
Johnson, Eric (Blackley)
Rawlinson, Peter


Costain, A. P.
Johnson Smith, Geoffrey
Redmayne, Rt. Hon. Martin


Courtney, Cdr. Anthony
Kerans, Cdr. J. S.
Rees-Davies, W. R.


Craddock, Beresford (Spelthorne)
Kerby, Capt. Henry
Renton, David


Crosthwaite-Eyre, Col. O. E.
Kerr, Sir Hamilton
Ridley, Hon. Nicholas


Crowder, F. P.
Kirk, Peter
Ridsdale, Julian


Cunningham, Knox
Lagden, Godfrey
Robinson, Sir Roland (Blackpool, S.)


Curran, Charles
Lancaster, Col. C. G.
Roots, William


Currie, C. B. H.
Leavey, J. A.
Ropner, Col. Sir Leonard


de Ferranti, Basil
Leburn, Gilmour
Royle, Anthony (Richmond, Surrey)


Digby, Simon Wingfield
Legge-Bourke, Maj. H.
Sandys, Rt. Hon. Duncan


Donaldson, Cmdr. C. E. M.
Legh, Hon. Peter (Petersfield)
Scott-Hopkins, James


Doughty, Charles
Lewis, Kenneth (Rutland)
Seymour, Leslie


du Cann, Edward
Lilley, F. J. P.
Sharples, Richard


Duncan, Sir James
Lindsay, Martin
Shaw, M.


Eccles, Rt. Hon. Sir David
Linstead, Sir Hugh
Shepherd, William


Eden, John
Litchfield, Capt. John
Simon, Sir Jocelyn


Elliott, R. W.
Lloyd, Rt. Hn.Geoffrey (Sut'nC'dfield)
Skeet, T. H. H.


Emmet, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn
Longden, Gilbert
Smith, Dudley (Br'ntf'rd &amp; Chiswick)







Smyth, Brig. Sir John (Norwood)
Thornton-Kemsley, Sir Colin
Wells, John (Maidstone)


Stoddart-Scott, Col. Sir Malcolm
Tilney, John (Wavertree)
Williams, Paul (Sunderland, S.)


Studholrne, Sir Henry
Turner, Colin
Wills, Sir Gerald (Bridgwater)


Sumner, Donald (Orpington)
Turton, Rt. Hon. R. H.
Wilson, Geoffrey (Truro)


Talbot, John E.
van Straubenzee, W. R.
Wolrige-Gordon, Patrick


Tapsell, Peter
Vane, W. M. F.
Wood, Rt. Hon. Richard


Taylor, Sir Charles (Eastbourne)
Vickers, Miss Joan
Woodhouse, C. M.


Taylor, w. J. (Bradford, N.)
Vosper. Rt. Hon. Dennis
Woodnutt, Mark


Teeling, William
Wakefield, Edward (Derbyshire, W.)
Woollam, John


Temple, John M.
Wakefield, Sir Wavell (St. M'lebone)
Worsley, Marcus


Thatcher, Mrs. Margaret
Wall, Patrick
Yates William (The Wrekin)


Thomas, Peter (Conway)
Ward, Dame Irene (Tynemouth)



Thompson, Kenneth (Walton)
Watts, James
TELLERS FOR THE NOES:


Thorneycroft, Rt. Hon. Peter
Webster, David
Mr. Chichester-Clark and




 Mr. Whitelaw.

It being after Seven o'clock, The CHAIRMAN left the Chair, further Proceeding standing postponed until after the consideration of Private Business set down by direction of The CHAIRMAN OF WAYS AND MEANS under Standing Order No. 7 (Time for taking Private Business).

Mr. DEPUTY-SPEAKER resumed the Chair.

CITY OF LONDON (GUILD CHURCHES) BILL (By Order)

Order for consideration, as amended, read.

7.8 p.m.

Mr. Tom Driberg: I would be grateful for your guidance, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. Would it be convenient for me to move the Amendment now, or do you want to put the Question first?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Major Sir William Anstruther-Gray): I am obliged to the hon. Member. It would be more convenient if I were to put the Question now and then I will call the hon. Member to move his Amendment.

Question, That the Bill, as amended, be now considered, put and agreed to.

Mr. Driberg: Thank you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker.

Clause 8.—(ALTERATION OF WARD CHURCH.)

Mr. Driberg: I beg to move, in page 5, line 33, after "thereto" to insert:
provided that no such representation is to be made in respect of any question of doctrine, ritual or ceremonial, or in consequence of the social or political opinions or teachings of the incumbent of the existing Ward Church".
I hope not to have to detain the House too long on this Amendment. It affects far fewer people than the major debate which, unfortunately, it has been

necessary to curtail, but every hon. Member is aware that important issues of principle can sometimes arise from what seems to be, at first sight, quite narrow points. In this case, I suggest that we ought to consider very carefully what may be a threat to a fundamental liberty of a few of Mr. Speaker's own constituents, some of the clergymen of the Established Church holding benefices in the City of London.
The narrow point here concerns the provision which it is sought to include in the Bill to enable the alderman and common councillors of a ward in the City of London to change from one church to another as their official ward church, or, as the Bill puts it, to ask the Bishop of London to
revoke the designation and establishment of the existing Ward Church as the official church of that ward and … designate and establish as the official church thereof any other parish church or Guild Church … situate in that ward or in a ward adjacent thereto.
On the face of it, this seems a harmless enough provision, though if it is desirable I do not know why it was left out of the original Guild Churches Act of eight years ago. I do not think that any of us would object to such a change if it were sought for what one might call ordinary practical or even sentimental reasons.
The difficulty which I hint at in my Amendment might arise if it happened that among the Common Councilmen of a ward there were some with strong ecclesiastical or political prejudices. I am particularly anxious that this debate should not develop in any way into an argument on the merits of any of these prejudices; but hon. Members must be aware, particularly if there are any still among us who can recall the debates on the revised Prayer Book in 1927 and 1928, that there is a certain variety of doctrine and practice within the Church of England and that views on these


matters are held with passionate conviction. I am putting it as objectively and as mildly as I can.
Common Councilmen are as fully entitled to their ecclesiastical and political views as anyone else, but it would be deplorable if the procedure contemplated in Clause 8 of the Bill were set in motion for any such reasons as these —if, for instance, some of the Common Councilmen, or a majority of them in any ward, did not happen to like the particular kind of ceremonial or absence of ceremonial found in their designated ward church, or if they found the teaching of its incumbent uncomfortably prophetic—if he were to preach on a great civic occasion from one of the inconvenient texts like the one about the eye of a needle, or something like that.
The hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) was good enough to give me today, in reply to a Question which was not reached orally, a list of the existing ward churches. There are eleven of them, seven of Which are parish churches and four guild churches. The argument I am trying to put seems to me even stronger in the case of the guild churches than in the case of the parish churches, for the guild church vicars, who are appointed for a period of years only, are not protected by that ancient institution the parson's freehold, which, as I ventured to say on Second Reading on 25th February, has sometimes been used in the cause of freedom and sometimes for the purposes of tyranny.
In that debate, I also remarked that it might be disadvantageous to a clergyman, at least to the finances of his church, if it ceased to be a designated ward church. We should satisfy ourselves so far as we can, therefore, that the motives for any such change are what I have called harmless ones.
I now come to the gravest and most puzzling part of what I have to tell the House. After the debate on 25th February, I had a discussion with the Archdeacon of London, who has acted on behalf of the Bishop of London as promoter of the Bill and who has throughout been, as he always is, most helpful and courteous. He said that he was inclined to agree with me on this point and that if I would put to him a suitable Amendment on these lines, he

would put it up to the Bishop. I did so, using in my Amendment as nearly as possible the actual words which the Church authorities themselves used in the disciplinary Measures sent to us some years ago from the Church Assembly.
I know that there are one or two hon. Members here today who took part in the whole series of debates—the Incumbents' (Discipline) Measure and the other—[An HON. MEMBER: "The hon. Member voted against it."] Because it was impossible for the hon. Member who introduced it to give the undertaking which he was later able to give. As the hon. Member knows, one of the disadvantages of the Church Assembly Measure procedure is that these Measures cannot be amended in this House. They can only be accepted or rejected. That was the difficulty we were all in, and have been on numerous occasions.
7.15 p.m.
Today, this is not a Church Assembly Measure. It is a Private Bill promoted by or on behalf of the Bishop of London. It seems to me, however, that the argument I am putting is analogous to the argument which was put in those debates and which was ultimately found acceptable by the Church authorities and the Church Assembly themselves. Indeed, the fact that words such as these were included in those Measures surely shows that the Church of England itself does not regard this danger as a totally unreal one and that it would regard as unseemly and undesirable any attempt to penalise an incumbent in connection with matters such as these.
Accordingly, I sent my proposed Amendment to the Archdeacon of London and was in due course delighted to receive from him a letter, which stated, in part:
Many thanks for your letter of 10th March, which I have now had an opportunity of showing to the Bishop of London. The Bishop agrees with your proposal in principle and has asked me to take the necessary steps to have a new Clause drafted by our counsel in time for the Committee stage, after first consulting the City Corporation as a matter of courtesy. The Bishop asks me to say that he is very grateful for all your interest in the Guild Churches Bill …
And so on. That seemed very satisfactory. The Bishop, the promoter of the Bill, himself agreed in principle with the proposed Amendment.
I was the more distressed to learn at a later stage that the Amendment was not, after all, to be included—because, as I gather, it had not been acceptable to the City officials to whom the Bishop had shown it. It may be all right that "as a matter of courtesy" they should be shown the proposed Amendment, but I cannot feel that it is right that the City as such should be able to exercise a kind of veto on a proposal made in this House which is acceptable to the Church itself and to the promoter of a Private Bill.
I sympathise with the hon. Member for Chelmsford in the slightly embarrassing situation in which, perhaps, he finds himself. I hope, however, that he will accept my Amendment. In doing so, he would be asserting and defending the rights of the Church and its clergy on a matter on which the Church and, because of our strange system of establishment, Parliament should have the last word. It is we and the Church, not the City Corporation, who should have the last word on a Private Bill promoted in this House by the Bishop of London.
If the hon. Member cannot accept my Amendment, he may repeat the argument that he used on Second Reading—that such an Amendment is unnecessary because, as he said in an interjection,
The final decision rests with the Bishop." —[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th February, 1960; Vol. 618, c. 679.]
—and that the Bishop would never allow the machinery to be set in motion for unworthy or irrelevant motives.
Unfortunately, it is no longer open to the hon. Member to use that argument. He has been deprived of it by the action of the Bishop of London himself in showing the proposed Amendment to the City authorities, not merely as a matter of courtesy, but so that they could have the last word on it. I have the highest personal regard for the present Bishop of London, but if he, so to speak, truckles to the City authorities on this matter, what is the value of any assurance that he or his successors would not truckle to a powerful ward organisation which wanted to change its church for the wrong reasons?
I must, therefore, ask the hon. Gentleman to give an undertaking that he will look at this matter again, and that when this Bill comes up in another place some

words will be introduced into it which will meet my point and contain the substance of this Amendment.

Mr. Peter Kirk: I just want to add a very few words in support of the Amendment moved by the hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg). I think that the House as a whole should be grateful to him for spotting this point at such an early stage and for putting his case with so much restraint. It is very rarely that I agree with the hon. Member on any point at all, and, therefore, it is with the more pleasure that I feel that on this occasion he has right and justice on his side.
I approach this matter in, perhaps, a slightly broader context than the hon. Member. It is, of course, true that the rights of 11 constituents of yours, Mr. Speaker, are threatened by this Bill, and four of them in particular, those four who are the holders of livings of the guild churches and, therefore, are deprived of their freehold, but I am myself an unrepentant opponent of the present Establishment position of the Church of England and I always have been, speaking as I do as a son of a bishop of that Church and so, I suppose, with a certain element of hereditary authority, if nothing else; and I think that the Church of England is already at the moment so pushed around by quite a number of different authorities that we do not want to add the City of London to that list.
I myself feel very strongly that in a matter of this kind it is for the Church and the Church itself to decide who it is who will designate a ward church. If the Diocese of London felt happy about the arrangements which existed up to the time when this Bill was proposed, and if it felt happy with the Amendment which the hon. Member for Barking put forward at an earlier stage, it really is not the business of the City authorities to decide that they are not happy, and that, therefore, the whole Bill is to be upset in this way.
I do not know whether by hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton), for whom I have an enormous regard, can accept the Amendment as it stands. Maybe there are words in it which would not be suitable in a Bill of this kind. Nevertheless, I hope very much that between now and the stage


when the Bill receives the Royal Assent he will consider very carefully whether, in fact, the power to try to change an existing situation which is now given to the Common Councilmen in any ward of the City of London is quite a right power to give in these circumstances, and whether in fact the liberties of the Church of England are properly preserved by the procedure which is laid down in this Bill.
I feel that the hon. Member for Barking has done a great service to the Church in raising this matter and I hope very much that it will be considered again before the Bill becomes law.

Sir Hubert Ashton: First, I should like to express my appreciation of the manner in which this Amendment has been moved by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg) and seconded by my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesend (Mr. Kirk). This is an extension, as the hon. Member for Barking has said, of part of the debate we had on 25th February. I will, if I may, deal with the last part of his speech first.
Initially, I would make it quite clear that it is true that the Amendment was not objected to by the Bishop of London. The object, indeed, of the Amendment is to offer certain protection to City clergy, particularly to the guild church vicars who no longer enjoy the parson's freehold, a point which the hon. Gentleman the Member for Barking himself emphasised. It is the well established principle that no clergyman should be penalised or suffer any disadvantage owing to his doctrine, provided that it is in accordance with the doctrine of the Church of England, or because of his ceremonial practices, provided they do not transgress the law, or, indeed, because of his political opinions. There are these two parties concerned in the Act and now this amending Bill, the City authorities and the Bishop of London.
The Bishop, on further reflection, feels that he really is not able to support the proposed Amendment in its context in this Bill, and the reason which has prompted him to hold this view is that he feels that it might be interpreted as reflecting upon the Alderman and Common Councilmen of a ward who have the right under the Bill to make these

representations to change the ward church. The Bishop is particularly anxious that no possible cause should be given to any such reflections on the propriety of any representations which might be made to him under Clause 8 of the Bill. The Bishop and the Corporation enjoy each other's full confidence.
I will say, if I may, that I am speaking tonight on behalf of the City as well as the Church. I greatly regret, as has been said before, that you, Mr. Speaker, cannot do this, owing to the very high office you now occupy, because you would have been able to do it with far greater eloquence than I can possibly command.
Furthermore—and this is a point which was made before—the Bishop's power under the Bill to accede to such representations is permissive only, not mandatory. I interjected that, as the hon. Member said, in his speech, and was supported later on by the hon. Gentleman the Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher) on this point, which I think is an important one.
I feel that it might be helpful if, just for a moment, I come to some of the reasons which would make the change of a ward church desirable and which I touched on in answer to the hon. Gentleman's Question earlier today. When, after the passing of the City of London (Guild Churches) Act, 1952, ward churches were first established some City churches were in ruins, and have since been restored or are in process of restoration. It may be that at that time one or more of the original ward churches were second choices, since possibly the first choice was not then available. Furthermore, a church may then have been a ward church which was in a ward adjacent to the ward concerned, as the 1952 Act allowed.
It might well be that the civic authorities would wish to change to a church actually in the ward concerned because such a church is now restored and available or likely soon to become available. If, in the future, a parish or guild church becomes redundant for purposes of worship and is, therefore, closed or diverted to another use, and that church is also a ward church, it will be necessary to establish another church as a ward church in its place. This may possibly be the case with St. Michael's Paternoster Royal.
There have not been any representations made because we are discussing Clause 8 and this is not on the Statute Book, but a great number of unofficial discussions have been taking place during the last few years between the civic authorities and the Archdeacon of London on these matters, and I think it is really clear that in principle this amendment in the Bill for this greater freedom is indeed desirable.
Coming, then, to the arguments which were put forward by the proposer and seconder of the Amendment, I agree that possibly I am in something of a difficult position tonight, but I would put it to the House that the proposed Amendment, moved not in quite the same forceful and picturesque language as was used on Second Reading in discussion of this point, nevertheless does seem to assume that the Alderman and Common Councilmen of a ward cannot quite be trusted and will make improper representations.
I should like to assure the hon. Gentleman that in the discussions to which I have just referred the points regarding which he has expressed anxiety never once have been touched upon and have never been in mind at all. Furthermore, the Bishop, in these very improbable circumstances, would, as I say, be the second line of defence. As I mentioned earlier, he would and must have careful regard to the issues raised.

7.30 p.m.

Mr. Driberg: If the argument which the hon. Member is using at this moment is correct, that this Amendment would cast a slight slur on the Aldermen and Common Councilmen and imply that they could not be trusted, would not the same argument have applied to the Incumbents (Discipline) Measure—that it would oast a slur on churchwardens, patrons and communicants of the Church of England, any of whom are entitled to institute proceedings against an incumbent but not on the grounds stated?

Sir H. Ashton: I personally do not believe, if I may continue the argument I am making, that the City authorities and the Bishop would ever act improperly in making a change of a ward church. On the other hand, normally I think that I would have asked the House to consider this Amendment as slightly superfluous and therefore to reject it. But I

have been impressed. My position as the Second Church Estates Commissioner is a difficult one and I feel that I would like to listen, if I may, to further argument on this matter, if there is to be any, and with the permission of yourself, Mr. Speaker, and the House, perhaps return to it, giving my specific advice to the House later. May I infer that that would be in order?

Mr. Speaker: I cannot foresee if the hon. Member will have leave of the House, but I have a suspicion that be might have it.

Mr. Eric Fletcher: May I have a personal word on this subject, as I took part in the Second Reading debate? The hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) has referred to something I said. I very much hope that, in view of the concluding remarks of the hon. Member for Chelmsford, the House will allow him to add something to what he has already said at the end of this debate. I think the hon. Member realised that there was a serious problem here, and I rather gathered from what he said that he had not reached any final conclusion but was willing to listen to different points of view.
Speaking for myself, I find that the position has changed radically from what it was on Second Reading. I must remind the House of what I said in commenting on the speech made on Second Reading by my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg). My hon. Friend then said, referring to Clause 8:
it gives an impression of civic tycoons throwing their weight about to try to intimidate or to discriminate against some parson whose preaching may be too stark and prophetic for their digestions.
I then expressed the opinion that it was unlikely that anybody in the City of London would for
… unworthy, frivolous or political purposes abuse the right to ask that the designation of a ward church should be revoked."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd February, 1960; Vol. 618, c. 679 and 681]
I adhere to that opinion. I think it most unlikely, if the Bill remains un-amended, that the City Corporation or the members of the ward concerned would abuse their right to ask for the designation of a ward church to be


revoked. I think it is unlikely that they would exercise their right on frivolous or political grounds.
The difficulty that I am in is this. I think that if this point had not been raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Barking, and this Amendment were not on the Order Paper, the Bill would have gone through and the point would probably never have arisen in a concrete form; it would have been quite academic. That is no longer the position. My hon. Friend the Member for Barking has raised the matter as a specific concrete problem for the decision of Parliament.
We have to decide whether or not we shall write into the Bill a provision that
no representation is to be made in respect of any question of doctrine, ritual or ceremonial, or in consequence of the social or political opinions or teachings of the incumbent …
It seems to me, therefore, that if we reject the Amendment we shall, by implication, be assenting to the proposition that the aldermen and councillors will be entitled to make
… representation in respect of any question of doctrine, ritual or ceremonial, or in consequence of the social or political opinions or teachings of the incumbent.
I should be unwilling to assent to that proposition. I think that it would not only be regrettable—I was going to say reprehensible, but that is probably too strong a word—if any representations were made on those grounds. I have no reason to suppose that they would be. If we reject the Amendment, we are by implication acknowledging that the aldermen and councillors have a right to make representations on those grounds.

Sir H. Ashton: No.

Mr. Fletcher: That is how it seems to me, and in support of that argument I shall introduce two further arguments. First, from what my hon. Friend said, and it was not disputed by the hon. Member, when this matter was put to the Bishop of London he was in favour of the Amendment and was prepared to accept it.

Sir H. Ashton: It was agreed in principle. But I think that in considering it

in this particular context he took the view which I have just expressed to the House.

Mr. Fletcher: He accepted it in principle, but in this context he felt that there was a difficulty. That difficulty was apparently reinforced by the observations of certain City officials. I think it has to be considered whether their objections have any validity. If they apparently take the view that if these words were put in the Bill it would be a reflection upon them and that there would be an assumption that they might make some representations on these grounds, I cannot share that view at all. I do not think there is any force in that statement. It does not seem to me that there is the slightest reflection of any kind on these worthy gentlemen in the City, your constituents, Mr. Speaker, by making clear what even they recognise as implicit—that they should not make any representations on these grounds.
It does not seem to me that there is any more reflection on them in putting these words in the Bill than there is in the other Measures which protect incumbents throughout the land from their removal for doctrinal or political views. All that is suggested here is that the incumbents of the ward churches, who, as the hon. Member recognises, have not the ordinary free rights which the parish priest has in his freehold, should have the same kind of protection. Then he said that the final decision is with the Bishop and that that is a complete safeguard. It seems to me that it would be wrong even to contemplate that some future Bishop of London might find himself in the position of having representations made to him on those grounds.
Whatever we decide in view of the debate which my hon. Friend has initiated, if the Amendment is rejected it is highly likely that at some future time some aldermen or councillors may want to make some representations on grounds—let us face it—which in all probability will be ambiguous and quite vague. I cannot quite visualise on what grounds representations will be made if they are not made on grounds which are perhaps to some extent allied to one of these which my hon. Friend mentioned. There may be a situation in which considerations of this kind enter into the


merits of the matter which the Bishop finally has to decide. I therefore think that we should strengthen the hand of this or any future Bishop of London if we made the position abundantly clear.
The hon. Member for Chelmsford has been good enough to say that he will reconsider the matter. As it seems to me that the only reason we are troubled with the debate is in order to appease the rather delicate sensitivities, as it seems to me, of the aldermen and councillors in the City, will the hon. Member consider whether an alternative form of words might suit my hon. Friend, meet the spirit of the Amendment and be acceptable to the Bishop and, at the same time, remove from the aldermen and councillors any possible suggestion that there is any reflection on them?
My suggestion is that instead of adding this proviso to Clause 8 (1), here or in another place or at some subsequent stage, an Amendment should be added to Clause 8 (2) making it clear that the Bishop should not make an order revoking the designation of a ward church on any question of doctrine, ritual or ceremonial. If the proviso were added to the Bishop's powers, that would not impose any limitation on the aldermen and councillors and it would serve precisely the same purpose of making it clear that these were grounds which should not be brought into play either in the representations or in the decision of the Bishop. I therefore suggest that this is a serious problem and that there is an opportunity to find a form of words which should be acceptable, I think, to all parties.

7.45 p.m.

Sir Wavell Wakefield: Towards the end of his speech the hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg) said that this was a matter for the Church itself to decide. It is clear from the Bill that any decision which is made will be made by the Church and by nobody else.
I therefore suggest that the hon. Member's argument has no validity. Clause 8 says that
the aldermen and common councilmen of that ward may at any time make a representation to the bishop….
All they are empowered and entitled to do under the Clause is to make representations—nothing else. Surely there is nothing wrong in that. The aldermen and

common council men are there as representatives, and surely they ought to be in a position to make representations. We in the House would greatly resent it if we were restricted in our opportunities to make representations on any matter. I cannot see why there should be any limitation on any representations which the aldermen and common councilmen think fit to make in the interest of the members of their ward. That is all that the Clause entitles them to do.
It seems to me that, the representations having been made, it is entirely within the power of the Bishop to decide what he should do about them. As I read it, it will be for the Bishop and for the Church to decide what should be done. My hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) gave certain very valid reasons why it was desirable that there should be a provision such as this in the Clause to enable these changes to be made as may be necessary. We all agree that it is necessary that some such provision be included in the Bill. I think that the Bill is quite right and proper as it stands.
It should be said on behalf of the City Council that, as far as I am aware, it has not sought these powers in the Bill and has made no representations that the Clause should be framed in this way in order to give it powers to make representations. Having said that, it seems to me not to be reasonable that the Aldermen and Common Councilmen should be denied the right to make representations on any subject about which they care to make representations on behalf of the people they represent.

Sir Godfrey Nicholson: I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) indicated that he was prepared to listen to the debate and to reconsider the matter. I came into the Chamber with an open mind, but my mind has been made up for me by the last two speeches; and when I say that I hope that it will not be taken as impertinent. It seems to me that to both the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher) and my hon. Friend the Member for St. Marylebone (Sir W. Wakefield) what mattered was that the decision ultimately was taken by the Bishop. Not only the present Bishop of London, for whom I have the greatest respect and affection,


but I am sure all future Bishops of London will take decisions on sound and right lines. One is not likely to be a small-minded man if one becomes Bishop of London.
I am anxious to avoid the injection into Church affairs, more than there is now, of Church party politics. I do not want to see any Bishop of London placed in the position of having to adjudicate between extremist Aldermen or Common Councilmen, never mind which party— extremely Evangelical or extremely Anglo-Catholic, or whatever it may be— who are criticising and attacking the party which holds opposite views. It seems to me that the Church of England is bedevilled by internal party politics; this is the scandal of the Church in the literal sense of the word. It is opening the door, albeit a very small door, to a recrudescence and an intensification of that sort of danger if we reject the Amendment. It is a wound to the body of the Church when there are rows in a parish because the parishioners do not like the churchmanship of the incumbent. It will be a wound to the body of the Church if religious extremists in the City of London criticise and attack the vicar of one of these ward churches. For that reason I support the Amendment.
We are not considering the present or any future Bishop. I am considering a possible outburst of ritualistic rows and troubles such as have bedevilled the Church in the past and may well bedevil it again. The Church of England is in grave danger always of being split asunder by ecclesiastical party politics and doctrinaire dissent. I believe that the Amendment will stop up one small hole in that respect.

Sir Peter Agnew: I was not able to be in my place when the Bill was debated on Second Reading on 25th February. I should not have thought any more about it if the hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg) had not tabled the Amendment; but that has caused me to be present now, and I have not risen and sought to catch your eye, Mr. Speaker, without having given some thought to the issues involved.
I want to say at the outset, of course, that the Bishop of London would naturally be in favour in principle. He has

been quoted very much today, and I shall talk about him again. He would be in favour in principle of this kind of Amendment. I cannot conceive of any Bishop of London who is doing his pastoral duty, with all the responsibility that that involves, consenting to make a change in the designation of a ward church on the grounds that the hon. Member for Barking and those who agree with him seek to rule out. But they have made out a case that the law should be fortified and that it should be stated specifically that the Bishop should not do so.

Sir G. Nicholson: Surely the whole issue is not a question of strengthening the hands of the Bishop but of limiting the grounds on which representations can be made. I wish that my hon. Friend would address himself to the point I put forward with so much conviction—that the danger to the Church is that petitions can be presented on this sort of grounds which do damage to the Church as a whole.

Sir P. Agnew: It is true that the Amendment is couched in the terms that my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Barking have stated, but it has been suggested by the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. E. Fletcher) that another Amendment should be substituted which should not say anything about the nature of the representations to be made but, on the other hand, should say a great deal about the factors that are not to guide the Bishop in arriving at his decision.

Sir H. Ashton: That has not been moved.

Sir P. Agnew: No, but it has been referred to. I suppose that to keep within the rules of order I should confine myself to considering the Amendment which has been moved.
I would say that bodies as well as individuals often feel that they can make representations about all sorts of things which are completely irrelevant. I have never been a Minister of the Crown, but I am sure that those who are now sitting on the Government Front Bench will bear me out in saying that many representations are made to them about what course they should pursue in arriving at Ministerial decisions which are wholly


irrelevant and sometimes grossly improper as factors to be taken into consideration by them. It is not any point at all in this case that the acceptance of the Amendment would cast some kind of slur on the City fathers and all the establishment in the City.
On the other hand, I think that what factors the Bishop should properly take into account when he is coming to his own decision—and he is the only person who makes a decision—are of very great importance. I should like to put the Amendment into some perspective with regard to the rest of our ecclesiastical practice in the Established Church of England. At present when bishops themselves are appointed it is the Crown that makes the appointment on the recommendation of the Prime Minister of the day, a man who holds particular party political opinions.
If there were real substance in what is the background of the Amendment, somebody should bring in a Bill and get it passed into law to provide that the advice tendered to the Crown in appointing a bishop should not have regard to any of the things stated in the Amendment. There is a very strong case for saying that.

Mr. Kirk: Disestablish the Church altogether.

Sir P. Agnew: That is another matter. I was speaking within the context of the Established Church and it is within that context that we have to deal with the Bill.
My apposition to the Amendment, which is absolutely firm, is based on this simple ground—that if this Bishop of London, and that is unthinkable, or if any Bishop of London or the bishop of any diocese based his administrative decisions of a parallel kind to this on the considerations given in the Amendment it would be clearly a gross abuse of his supreme pastoral authority. To put these considerations into the Bill would be to restrict and fetter the Bishop. [HON. MEMBERS: "NO."] Yes, I think the Amendment would 'have that effect.
It is not the Corporation that is having a slur cast upon it. It is being cast upon the good sense and the wisdom and the special qualities with which the Bishop is invested and by reason of which he is appointed and consecrated a

bishop. It is these that unwittingly have been called into question by the hon. Member for Barking and those who support him. For these reasons it is far better and wiser not to seek to put things of this kind into the Bill, which is largely administrative in character, but to rest instead in the first place upon the common sense of the Council-men of the City of London and, secondly, on the good, wise and fatherly administration of the Bishop of the diocese. I therefore reject the Amendment.

Mr. Ede: The hon. Member for Worcestershire, South (Sir P. Agnew) might easily have found himself in very strange company if he had pursued one of his points only a little further. We hear about the Corporation in this matter and about the authorities of the City, but I have heard no one saying that either the Corporation as such or the City authorities as such have asked for the Clause and for the power that it gives to the Alderman and Common Councillors for the particular ward that is concerned.

Sir H. Ashton: This is an Amendment to Section 32 of the 1952 Act. They have the same powers under the Section to make a ward church. I think I am correct in saying that it was in agreement with the Aldermen and City Councillors that it was provided that they should have these powers of making representations.

8.0 p.m.

Mr. Ede: Have they any evidence that the Court of Common Council or the Corporation of the City have made any representations asking that Clause 8 should be in the Bill? So far as I can make out, from the wording this Clause does not—and I am quite sure that the Second Church Estates Commissioner, by the telegraphic signs he is trying to make—

Sir H. Ashton: I was incorrect, I apologise.

Mr. Ede: I am not sure where we are now.

Sir H. Ashton: The right hon. Gentleman was correct in his argument.

Mr. Ede: I thank the hon. Gentleman.
This Clause, as it is worded, seems to me to give power to a very few people.


We are trying to amend the Clause to avoid an evil, which I thought it was the intention of the hon. Member for Farn-ham (Sir G. Nicholson) to avoid—I am trying to support him. Anyone who represents an area including Farnham Castle ought to be an authority on prisons. 
This appears to give power to the Alderman and Common Councillors of a ward in the City, a very limited number of people who need not reside in the City. In fact, I imagine that few members of the Common Council reside within the City of London. I remember the trouble which I had when I was Home Secretary in trying to get an electoral register for the City of London, owing to the way in which the property had disappeared.

Sir P. Agnew: I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman apparently took the electoral register away from them altogether.

Mr. Ede: No, I did not. Hitler did that. I did the best I could to restore the damage which he inflicted.
This seems to me an amazing power to be put into the hands of a very limited number of people, to make representations with regard to the incumbent in certain circumstances which this Amendment seeks to avoid. I support the ground on which my hon. Friend the Member for Driberg—[Laughter]—my hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg)—after all, what I said first sounds rather better than the somewhat disrespectful way in which the name of my hon. Friend's constituency might be used in an allusion to his utterances.
I support the Amendment because I think that in every denomination what my hon. Friend described as the prophetic utterances of the clergy ought to be preserved. It may be necessary on occasion for the incumbent, in the discharge of the duties he has assumed, to say things which might arouse the animosity of a small group within his congregation. We want to get away from the position which is illustrated by the lady who congratulated the vicar on a sermon he had preached because, as she said, "I can think of someone to whom everything you said applies."
This is a duty which the incumbent has to discharge, and in these highly specialised congregations it is probably more necessary that the incumbent should be protected against representations which might be made by a minority claiming to speak for the whole of the church congregation. I regret that matters like this should come before the House of Commons, because I do not think we are the best qualified people to deal with these matters. Unfortunately, the law imposes the duty on us and we cannot escape from it. But as there has been no representation from the City as a whole on this matter; as no one has claimed to speak in a representative capacity and supported the Clause as it stands and as the Archdeacon put the Bishop's words into writing in accepting both the spirit and the wording of my hon. Friend's Amendment, I hope that the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) will feel that he can accept it.

Sir W. Wakefield: Would not the right hon. Gentleman agree that the words set out in Clause 8 would never have been included unless there had been agreement between the Church authorities and the City that they should be so included?

Mr. Ede: No. I have been too long a Member of this House—and I have held responsible positions with regard to the legislation passed in this House— to accept that merely because the words are here, some people have reached agreement about them. One of the reasons why we have a Committee stage and a Report stage is in order to deal with those matters.

Mr. John E. Talbot: I intervene in this debate only because I am a liveryman of the City of London and one of the many hundreds, indeed thousands, who look up to the City as the font of municipal tradition, possessing a spirit which is unique in this country. I wish to present the viewpoint of the ordinary liveryman, and I am in no way briefed by the City authorities.
I feel that this Amendment is unnecessary because those who propose it are seeking to legislate for something which will never come to pass. If it is to have any value, it postulates to improprieties. First, that the Aldermen and Councillors


of the guild churches will make a representation, the spirit of which is wrong, and secondly, that the Bishop of London will accept that representation in a similar spirit. [HON. MEMBERS: "No."] I feel that it is making a difficulty where none is likely to exist.
I agree that it is inappropriate that laymen should make representations about doctrine, ritual or ceremony. I agree that the political opinions of an incumbent are his alone. But when we come to say that representations may not be made about social questions, we are opening up a wide field. It is precisely on that argument that it may well be necessary for representations to be made. The right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) said that the congregations of the guild church are highly specialised, and I reinforce that. These congregations are composed almost entirely of those who work or have a special personal interest in the City of London and its traditions.
I should not like to advance the theory that the Aldermen and Councillors of the City of London are never wrong or can do no wrong. But I maintain that the way in which the City has maintained its great traditions for eight hundred or nine hundred years without scandals of the type that this Amendment seems to indicate is sufficient warranty that such scandals will never occur. With such a scheme as this only in its infancy, a scheme which incorporates an entirely new type of partnership between Church and laity and which will result in an enormous amount of good, the less technicalities we introduce the better. I repeat that this is a case where we should go forward in trust, in the certain knowledge that, with its history and traditions, the City and those who rule it will never do anything which is wrong.

Sir H. Ashton: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and to the House for allowing me to say a few additional words. I have listened to this debate with interest, but it would be foolish to suggest that my task is at all an easy one. Therefore, I suggest this course of the House. There are differences of opinion on what is obviously an important matter and I do not think that it would be right and proper to accept the Amendment which is before the House at present.
On the other hand, the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher) made

a suggestion that certain words might be included in Clause 8 (2), after "the bishop", which would achieve the kind of thing which many hon. Members have had in mind. It would, perhaps, be a mistake in a matter of this importance to make any decision tonight, but, as Second Church Estates Commissioner, I have been asked to take the responsibility as I understand it. I therefore suggest to the House that we should be prepared to have a further look at the suggestion made by the hon. Member.

Sir G. Nicholson: I speak again, by leave of the House, to ask by hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) to clarify what he has said. Are we to understand that he is inclined to accept the sort of suggestion made by the hon. Member for Islington, East (Mr. Fletcher)? That does not meet my point of view at all. How is he to give it consideration.

Sir H. Ashton: I had in mind that the hon. Member for Barking (Mr. Driberg) should withdraw his Amendment on the understanding that we should look at the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Islington, East. I may be quite wrong, but I understood that my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham (Sir G. Nicholson) supported that suggestion.

Sir G. Nicholson: No. I still feel strongly on this. I may have misinterpreted what the hon. Member said, but I thought he was talking about the powers and direction of the Bishop. What I am anxious to avoid is that questions of Church politics should raise their heads before they reach the bishop.

Mr. Gordon Walker: Leaving aside the merits of the case, may I ask how we would become repossessed of this matter so that, when the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ashton) has thought about it, we may know his views? Unless the debate in adjourned, I do not understand how, procedurally, he could look at the matter again and bring it before us to see whether we like what he then suggests.

Sir H. Ashton: I am not quite clear, but the suggestion was that the matter could be further considered and I take it, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, that it is within the powers of the House to consider it further?

Mr. Driberg: On a point of order. Would the hon. Member for Chelmsford (Sir H. Ash ton), or myself, be in order in moving the adjournment of the debate until another convenient day, so that the matter could be considered again?

Sir H. Ashton: Further to that point of order. Could the matter not be brought up again on Third Reading?

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I do not think that the Bill can be amended on Third Reading, once we pass it. The debate on the Bill could now be adjourned and the House could continue with its business on the next Bill. That, I think, would be possible.

Mr. Kirk: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy-Speaker. I distinctly remember that on the Third Reading of the Homicide Bill an Amendment was moved by the hon. Member for Nelson and Colne (Mr. S. Silverman). I should have thought that if it were possible on that Bill it would be possible on this Bill.

Mr. Gordon Walker: May I draw your attention, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, to page 508 of Erskine May where, from a quick reading, I think it says that Amendments can be moved on Third Reading and that they are not limited to drafting or consequential Amendments, but that previous notice of them in the form in which they are to be moved is required by Standing Order No. 43? I understand that, although it is a very unusual practice, it is within the rules of order for Amendments to be moved and accepted on Third Reading.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: I am obliged to the right hon. Member. I am aware that minor Amendments may be moved and accepted on Third Reading. It may be that what the right hon. Member has read from Erskine May could be stretched to comprehend the Amendment now before the House.

8.15 p.m.

Mr. Ede: Is it not as well to keep the position as simple as possible? Surely the simplest thing would be if by agreement we could adjourn the debate. Then the Second Church Estates Commissioner and others interested could have a consultation. He could have consultation with the promoters of the Bill and, possibly, some representative of the City. Then we could come back to the Bill and go straight on from where we are now, because he could inform us of what the result of the conversations was. I hope that we can keep this matter simple and not get involved in a discussion at some future time on the scope of the Amendment that we may have to move on Third Reading.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: Before we pursue what the right hon. Member for South Shields (Mr. Ede) has just said, may I refer to the question put by the right hon. Member for Smethwick (Mr. Gordon Walker) about Erskine May? Standing Orders, Private Business, 1959, provide, in paragraph 184
No amendments, not being merely verbal, shall be made to any private bill on the third reading".
That confirms my view that we would be hard put to it to include this Amendment in an Amendment on Third Reading.

Mr. Driberg: In that case, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, I beg to move, That the debate be now adjourned until a convenient date.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: That means the debate on the consideration of the Bill, as amended?

Mr. Driberg: Yes.

Question put and agreed to.

Debate to be resumed upon Wednesday.

ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF LONDON BILL [Lords] (By Order)

Order for Second Reading read.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

8.18 p.m.

Dr. Barnett Stross: I beg to move, to leave out "now" and at the end of the Question to add "upon this day six months."
This Bill seeks authority from Parliament to do three things. The first is to perform corporate acts and to hold meetings anywhere in England as it could hitherto lawfully perform and do in the City of London and the City of Westminster. Secondly, it authorises that the name, the Royal College of Physicians, be the corporate name. The reason for that, the House, I think, should know, is that this name has been in use for 102 years quite regularly, but was never authorised in the Acts of 1858, 1860, 1886 or 1956.
Going much further back, there seems evidence that by a charter given by Charles II authority was given, but at that time the physicians of London did not take advantage of their rights by bringing a Bill before Parliament. I am not surprised, for they were very busy with the plague of London, which I think kept them very fully occupied. The original title dates back to 1518— so we are dealing with an organisation of very ancient origin—to the time of Henry VIII, and it then was:
The President and College of Commonalty of the Faculty of Physic in London.
The third, and minor, thing which is asked for from this House is that the limit of £1,000 on the annual value of lands that may be held by the College shall be removed.
Hon. Members have a right at once to ask two questions of those of us who have put our names to the Amendment for the rejection of the Bill: first, why oppose such an innocent Measure, and, secondly, if we have to oppose it, why do we proceed to seek the absolute rejection of the Measure rather than formulate an instruction to the Committee? The answer is that the Bill is so framed that the type of Instruction

that one would have liked to put forward—it would have been an instruction relating to the constitution of the Royal College—would have been entirely out of order because it is not mentioned in the Bill.

Mr. Ronald Bell: Does it not inevitably follow from what the hon. Gentleman has said that it must be irrelevant?

Dr. Stross: When the hon. Gentleman knows as much about medicine as he does about the law, he will learn not to rise in his place so eagerly until he has heard a little more about the Bill.
Much as my hon. Friends and I sympathise with the desire of the college to move from its present home in Pall Mall, East to Regent's Park and to receive authority for a title that it has long used, we are left with the fact that we can only move the rejection of the Bill in the form we are now doing it in order to obtain time for a debate upon this body which asks for privileges from this honourable House.
I have been criticised, and the term used about me in taking this action, in a note in The Lancet and quoted in The Times, is that I am misusing Parliamentary procedure. This is an interesting viewpoint to take, and I am much too kindly in temperament to take any objection to it, for it is impossible to feel disturbance or annoyance when the basis of the objection raised results from ignorance of our procedure in this House. I hope every Member of the House, and certainly those at the moment in the Chamber, knows what our procedure is and the machinery by means of which we can obtain a debate which could otherwise never be achieved at all.
I want to make it clear at this stage that it is not the intention of my hon. Friends and myself to dictate to the Royal College. What we ask it to do is to think again about the matter with which I will now deal at once, namely, the grievance felt by many of the members of the Royal College who have raised this matter with us. It is on their behalf that we speak and not because we have any private axe to grind, and if we could not raise grievances in the House, then it would be a very unhappy day indeed for this Legislature.
In the first place, one must remember that the highest medical qualification


given to physicians in this country is membership of the Royal College. Fellows of the Royal College are elected, or, as some people feel, selected, from the members, but they are elected only by the existing Fellows and not by members. Members can be put forward for Fellowship only by other Fellows and not by a member. This list of those who are so sponsored does not reach the Council of the Royal College directly, but first, as hon. Members will have seen if they have read what the Parliamentary agents for the Royal College have distributed to us, there are two committees which have to screen the names. Only those who pass through these two meshes then reach the Council, and voting then is by ballot. Members who have written to me do not themselves fully understand this procedure and they do not think it is reasonable that when their names are put forward in the ordinary way by Fellows for a Fellowship their names should not go forward directly for ballot.
There is another point which has been put by members. We must not, and cannot, treat Fellowship lightly. It is a very important and graceful distinction that goes, by and large, only to those who are thought fit by the Fellows for the highest honour that they can confer. But there is another implication, too, for members tell me that in their view merit awards—that means increased financial rewards—more easily follow Fellowship when Fellowship is once attained. Therefore, they feel nervous of criticising the constitution of the College or the method of election for fear that they will become unpopular. This may be absolutely wrong on their part, but I am here to voice the views which have been put to me.
Membership, which I have said is the highest qualification that one can achieve in medicine apart from surgery, is almost essential today for the higher posts in the hospital service, and among the members of the Royal College are, indeed, many of our most eminent physicians. Yet they say that apart from two of them out of roughly 4,000 they have no voice on the Council. There is a standing committee of some 20, elected by members, and two of those twenty are added to the approximately 900 Fellows, so that there are two voices from the members and 900 from the Fellows, but there are

roughly five times as many members as there are Fellows. They consider this to be wrong, and it is this that they consider to be a grievance.
Looking at the circulated description of the constitution of the College which has been sent to us, we notice from the last page that it is open to any Fellow at any time to propose an alteration to the byelaws relating to the method of election to Fellowship, and the members of the College can at any time raise the same question through their elected representatives on the Council of the College. I have mentioned that there are two such representatives. I am told that they have never done so—I think this is important—neither has any member of the College ever complained to the College. That rather frightens me in view of the information that I have received from members. I find it frightening that representations should be made to us and that the officers of the college have no knowledge that there is any feeling whatsoever about this matter. It is, therefore, important to remember that dissatisfaction has apparently not reached the upper circles of the Royal College itself. The members feel that they are disfranchised.
What is even more archaic and worse is this. A Fellow has no vote unless he is present in person in London at the headquarters of the Royal College. I heard from a past-president some years ago that, of the 900 Fellows, the largest number meeting together was a little over 300. I understand that it is normally about 90. If it is 90, it means that 10 per cent. of the Fellows meet to elect their officers, to make decisions, and to elect further Fellows from the membership.
This would not appear to be a very large percentage, but it is made worse by the fact that, as voting is in person and no postal vote even for Fellows is allowed, Fellows who are in the provinces are at a disadvantage, and the many Fellows who are scattered all over the world virtually cannot vote at all. They cannot come to quarterly meetings, or even annual meetings, from Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. It is certainly difficult to do so.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: It is not unlike the system by which the hon. Member is elected.

Dr. Stross: All hon. Members are elected by people going to vote. Everyone has a vote. It is one man, one vote. At the Royal College two men have a vote for 4,000, if they are members, whereas every Fellow has a vote if he is able to be in London, but he has no vote if he happens to be at the other end of the world, even though he is a Fellow. I know that it is complicated, but I can see that the noble Lord is trying to follow me. I can assure him that the procedure I am discussing is quite as archaic and old-fashioned as our own.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: That is entirely my point. The procedure is almost identical to that by which the hon. Member himself is elected.

Dr. Stross: But not quite. We have postal votes. The noble Lord has missed the point here.
Other organisations of great standing, such as the Royal College of Surgeons, differ. One becomes a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons by examination, and therefore this difficulty does not arise. Nonetheless, about 100 years ago there was great difficulty with the Royal College of Surgeons and a determined attack was made by those who felt that they were then disfranchised. After very considerable agitation, they won a great victory. Now I think that the Royal College of Surgeons is a democratic body.
I think that some Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians would deny this and say, "What nonsense. To allow a young surgeon because he becomes a Fellow to have a vote and the same rights of raising his voice as the most eminent surgeon is ludicrous." Some Fellows argue in this way, but that does not affect me very much, and I think that they are wrong not to trust their younger people a little more. We are not speaking only of young and inexperienced people when we speak of members of the Royal College of Physicians. Many of them are very mature men who have been members for twenty or thirty years or longer.
The Scottish colleges again appear to be more forward-looking than the very eminent organisation which I am now describing. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is at present revising its constitution. I do not know

in what direction it is revising it, but it is in process of revision. It is understood in Scotland that any member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, if for some years he takes a real interest in his College, is likely to be elected to Fellowship. Therefore, in that respect, it is more democratic than our own English college.
We plead that a little breath of air by way of a wind of change should also permeate the chambers of the English institution.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: A fatal doctrine.

Dr. Stross: Two very radical changes were suggested to me by the members who wrote to me. First, they asked why all members should not have a right to vote to elect the executive, and even a right to put forward other members.

Mr. Robert Cooke: How many members have written to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) on this subject?

Dr. Stross: That is a very proper question to ask me. I have had eight letters, and I propose to read one or two of them tonight before I finish.

Mr. Cooke: Can the hon. Gentleman tell us how many members of the Royal College of Physicians there are?

Dr. Stross: If the hon. Member had been here to listen to me or, being here, had listened, he would have heard me give the numbers. Last year, there were, I believe, 3,856 members, but I mentioned a rough figure of 4,000. No doubt, if the hon. Member gets the opportunity he will give his views to the House.
I have been asked by members of the Royal College to say that they think that they should have some right of government and, therefore, should have a vote. They also think that even if they do not have a vote, the Fellows, at least, should have a postal vote, so that Fellows themselves should not be disfranchised. I said earlier that I have not asked for this debate in order to dictate what this ancient institution should or should not do, but in order to raise grievances that have been brought to my notice.
I feel that any progressive and forward-looking alteration in the constitution of the Royal College would bring it into


the esteem that it rightly should have in the eyes of everyone. Judging from the attitude of the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke), there may be one or two hon. Members who ask themselves: why should we in this house intervene at all? [Interruption.] They may ask: is not its own constitution a purely private matter for the College? I must answer that, because some of those who have just cheered my rhetorical question have not, perhaps, been in the House as long as I have. It may be that they are right in feeling as they do, but I think that the answer is not as palatable as it should be.
Members have roughly one chance in five of ultimate election to Fellowship, I am advised that open pressure by members, or criticism by them, does not enhance their ultimate chance. I have already made it clear that they think that substantial financial awards tend to flow after Fellowship. They therefore feel— and I quote from an article in the British Medical Journal of 1956—that they must remain, as were the founders in 1518:
Persons that be profound, sad, and discreet, groundedly learned, and deeply studied in physic.
Therefore, if there is to be any discussion, Parliament must speak up in this matter, and if any hon. Members feel that Parliament must never discuss the constitution and affairs of an organisation that presents a Bill asking for privilege, Parliament has changed in an extraordinary fashion. I am sure that no one here would accept that proposition.
The three Members for Stoke-on-Trent have appended their names to this Motion. There is nothing untoward in that; it is simply that the three Members always work together, and collaborate in everything they do, whichever' one of them takes the lead. I have said that I have had representations from members of the College from many parts of the country. I insist on warning, or advising hon. Members who do not, as yet, seem to agree with me, that the misgivings are widely if obscurely felt.
At this stage, perhaps I may quote a short letter—

Dr. Alan Glyn: Is the hon. Member suggesting that he has any section of opinion with him when he repre-

sents one in 500 of the members of the body of which he speaks? Secondly, would not he agree that what he says is completely outside the scope of the present Bill, and that it does not come into this debate at all? Thirdly, would he not agree that the Fellows have one of the highest standards in the world, and that he is endeavouring to pour discredit on them?

Dr. Stross: I have heard some nonsense sometimes uttered in this House; I have never heard a more nonsensical and stupid intervention than that. Of course, the hon. Gentleman is new to this House. Before he makes statements, why does he not study our procedure and realise what my rights are? He is suggesting that we in this House have no right to discuss anything when a Bill is brought before us. To say that I am denigrating the Fellows of the Royal College is the most arrant nonsense. Let the hon. Gentleman not think that I give way to him in admiration for and knowledge of a profession that I have served for a much longer time than he has.
I want to read a short letter that I have received:
I should like to tell you that I support most sincerely your effect to alter the Royal College of Physicians of London Bill. In company with very many other physicians who are members of the college I feel that the conduct of the college's affairs is such that we are as I think you have said 'disenfranchised'. The conduct of the college's affairs seems archaic and contrasts very badly with the other professional bodies of similar standing.
The Royal College denies that last phrase, that the conduct of the College's affairs is archaic and contrasts badly with bodies of similar standing. It defends its paternalistic attitude. Fellowship is not a matter of examination. We have to know whom we are choosing.
I had a letter from a very well-known psychiatrist who asked me whether I noted—he used very strong language which I am not going to quote—on page 121 of a book called "Call the Doctor " reference to the fact that this is not the first time there has been criticism of the Royal College of Physicians. Here we note that in 1767 the licentiates of the College were very angry because in


a pamphlet the then President of the College had
quoted from the statutes of the College a clause which called for 'the admission of those only to be Fellows who, being graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, besides approved learning and morals, have also agreeable and sociable dispositions.'
That is a long time ago. The truth is that the licentiates felt that this was an aspersion upon them. They got a locksmith to pick the lock of the door when the Fellows were dining in secret. They forced their way in and with their golden-headed canes broke all the windows. I have asked for this debate for only one reason—in order that utterances which obviously never reach the Royal College, the Fellows or the government of the College, should reach them from us if not through anyone else.
I should like to read one paragraph in an editorial written in the British Medical Journal of 7th April, 1956. This editorial was headed " The Gold-headed Cane" and was critical of the Royal College for reasons which may be brought out by others in the debate. The paragraph read as follows:
Those who have a great affection for something that has had a local habitation and a name in the realm of medicine since 1618 should not feel guilty of impiety in voicing criticisms that are widely if obscurely felt. The antique mask the College wears on its official occasions has a certain faded charm of its own, but it sorts only too well with its present confusion of purpose. The Royal College of Physicians of London is faced with a challenge or a series of challenges with which it has so far come into only most reluctant and hesitating contact. Upon its ultimate response its welfare depends, and much of which is at the heart of medicine.
We who have objected to this Bill and ask for its rejection have at heart the welfare of the Royal College as well as the body of medicine.

8.45 p.m.

Sir Wavell Wakefield: As might well be expected, I have received a great many letters from constituents who have written asking me to support the Bill. In their letters they have expressed anxiety and great concern lest the Bill might, perhaps, be rejected by the House, and they have put to me the reasons why they consider that the Bill should go through. So far as I can see, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) has raised no objection whatever to anything in the

Bill. Indeed, he expressly stated that the objects of the Bill were proper and desirable and he wished to see it go through in order that its objects might be achieved.
At the same time, I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central on taking the opportunity which the Motion for a Second Reading has given him and the House to ventilate and to learn of a grievance which exists. In the experience of nearly a quarter of a century in this House which I now have, there have been occasions when I and others have taken such an opportunity to ventilate grievances in this Chamber. It is one of the privileges of hon. Members to be able to ventilate grievances of their constituents or of others when such matters are brought to their notice. It is, therefore, a very right and proper thing that the hon. Gentleman has done.
I must tell the House that in all the letters which came to me I had no single complaint or grievance such as those raised by the hon. Member, but I realise that that does not mean that such grievances do not exist. I hope that, after having heard what the hon. Gentleman has said and what, perhaps, other hon. Members may say, the House will allow the Bill to have a Second Reading, and I express the further hope that the words said in the House in the ventilation of the grievances will be most seriously considered by those whose responsibility it is to see to the running of the Royal College of Physicians as it exists today. With those few words, I commend the Bill to the House.

8.48 p.m.

Mr. Kenneth Robinson: I am glad that the hon. Member for St. Marylebone (Sir W. Wakefield) does not, apparently, share the view which we heard expressed from the benches opposite that we were in some way wrong to raise these matters on the Royal College of Physicians of London Bill. I detected in some hon. Members the same kind of resentment and, perhaps, indignation which has permeated the editorial paragraphs of the Lancet and the statement which the promoters of the Bill have circulated. They seem to feel that Parliament has no right to question the constitution or structure of the Royal College, or its methods.
I fully accept that the Royal College of Physicians of London is a most distinguished body which has a long history of service to medicine in this country. Nevertheless, it cannot conduct its affairs totally insulated from the world outside. We in this House are in a sense the consumers' representatives where the Royal College is concerned, and everything that it does ultimately, if indirectly, affects us as patients.
Therefore, much as the College would perhaps like to ignore Parliament, the very existence of this Bill shows that it cannot ignore Parliament. Under the terms of the Bill, we are asked to approve and to confer retrospective respectability on the title which the College has been using for about a hundred years, apparently without authority. Of course, it is a title which the College is fully justified in using, and it is obviously a legal accident that it has not got the title to it.
We are also asked in the Bill to allow the College to hold land in excess of £1,000 a year in value, and we understand that without a power of this kind the College would be unable to acquire the Someries House site where it hopes to erect a new college. I would say, in parenthesis, that if the architectural design of the building which the College proposes to put up is unworthy of its Nash setting, the Royal College might be in for a little further Parliamentary trouble later on.
These are all requests which, I fully agree with my hon. Friend, are perfectly reasonable and which we support, but if Parliament is being asked to grant to the College something which it wants and to confer upon it new powers, we are fully entitled to take a look at the institution. It is no good the College being touchy about this. The College must learn to listen to criticism, even if it comes from a quarter which it considers rather ill-informed.
I want to support what my hon. Friend said in moving the rejection of the Bill. For my part, I do not think that I have envisaged members voting for Fellows. It is one of the things upon which the promoters of the Bill in their statement poured scorn, but I am Strongly in favour of a postal ballot among Fellows themselves, for the reasons which my hon.

Friend gave. I cannot see any reason why members should not join in electing the officers of the College and perhaps of the Council. Why should they not participate in those elections?
It is also argued by the promoters that the fact that there are two members' representatives on the Council somehow or other negatives our claim that the Royal College is run in a somewhat undemocratic way. I do not think that two councillors out of nearly 4,000 members is a fully adequate representation. In the course of their statement, the promoters say that the College's method of electing Fellows is no less democratic than that of the Royal Society. Unless I am very much mistaken, the Royal Society has only Fellows. There are no members; the problem, therefore, does not arise, and this is a rather inappropriate analogy.
My hon. Friend dealt with the claim at the end of the promoters' statement that it was open to Fellows to propose any alteration in the by-laws. There is also the odd statement that no complaint has ever reached the college. If one reads the statement literally, no complaint about anything has ever reached the College from members, and if this is true, it can only be for the reasons put forward by my hon. Friend who opened this debate. It is perfectly plain that so much depends on the decision of the hierarchy of the College that members would be rash indeed to voice their criticisms too loudly.
Criticism that I have heard has not been confined to members. Indeed, Fellows have said to me since notice of the Bill appeared on the Order Paper that they thought that it was excellent that a debate should take place in the House and that the structure and constitution of the College should come under review.
The Royal College at one time spoke virtually for the entire medical profession. I think that it has fought fairly hard, understandably perhaps, to retain a comfortable monopolistic position. It cannot be said that it exactly encouraged the formation of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. I do not think that it encouraged the College of General Practitioners. I think that at the moment it is resisting, and successfully resisting, the establishment of a


Royal College of Psychiatry. It is difficult to discover where the proportionate responsibility for medical education lies. The College must accept some of that responsibility at any rate, possibly a major part of it.
Speaking as a layman, and perhaps with some temerity, I would venture the view that the teaching of medical students in this country has fallen far behind the needs of the time. Too little is taught of social medicine, which is of greatly increasing importance, and of psychological medicine. After all, nearly half the medical beds are occupied by patients suffering from some kind of mental disorder, many of them untreated perhaps simply because of the shortage of psychiatric staff. Yet the undergraduate medical student is taught next to nothing about psychological medicine. In the London teaching hospitals the position is perhaps worse than anywhere else in Britain.
Many distinguished physicians seem to regard psychiatry as a minor and very inferior branch of medicine. The result is that in the teaching of psychiatry we are lagging far behind the United States and Canada and, I think, substantially behind Scotland. There is as yet no Royal College of Psychiatry. I hope that there will be before very long, but meantime it is the duty of the Royal College to ensure that doctors are trained and equipped to deal with the medical conditions which they are most likely to meet. Those who relegate psychiatry to this inferior status are doing a grave disservice to the medical profession and to the hundreds of thousands of sufferers from mental disorders.
I have the impression—perhaps I am mistaken—that the Royal College of Physicians dislikes change in principle. It might reflect that we are living in a time of rapid and revolutionary change, when even the most august of institutions might find it useful to adjust itself.

Viscount Hinchingbrooke: This House, for example.

Mr. Robinson: I would agree with the noble Lord, if this were not an inappropriate time to discuss the matter, that it is high time this institution adjusted itself to changed circumstances.
If this debate has opened a window or two in an establishment where the

atmosphere may have become a trifle stale and stuffy—

Colonel Sir Malcolm Stoddart-Scott: Disgusting.

Mr. Robinson: —it can have done no harm. It may, perhaps, even have done a little good.

9.0 p.m.

Colonel Sir Malcolm Stoddart-Scott: A Bill like this gives an opportunity of saying a few words about this admirable and ancient institution, which has created a standard of medicine which has produced probably some of the finest physicians in the whole world. We in Britain take for granted the high standard of medical practice. It is one of our birthrights and we should think it extraordinary if we had to go abroad to get medical advice and medical services.
It is only when one goes abroad and hears what high respect is paid to our physicians that we realise the tremendous position which they hold. We see a steady stream of foreign patients visiting this country to benefit from their knowledge, their practice and their skill. We should think a long time before we make any suggestions of how this admirable institution should alter its organisation. We should be absolutely certain, too, before we make any suggestions that the changes that we suggest would be changes for the better.
To become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians is to receive an award for academic distinction. That can be done only by selection. It cannot possibly be done by election. To have a postal vote amongst 4,000 members would not assure us that we should be getting academic distinction for those who were most worthy to receive it.

Dr. Stross: Does the hon. and gallant Member not agree that a postal vote for the Fellows should certainly be considered at this stage?

Sir M. Stoddart-Scott: I should have thought that the best way to get the right awards is to have selection by the smallest number possible and not by the largest number. As soon as we start increasing the number of those who make the selection, we should not be assured that the academic distinction goes to the right people and we should, I am sure, water down the standard of the Fellows of the


Royal College. That is the last thing that this House would want to happen.
I am surprised that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) wishes the standards of the Royal College to be diminished by the methods which he has suggested. The hon. Member has expressed the dissident and dissatisfied views of eight members of the College. There will always be dissident and dissatisfied members, even if the selection is done by vote of the 4,000 members or the postal vote of Fellows. There will always be somebody who falls below the line and, therefore, will be dissatisfied and wish to have some other method of choice of Fellows.
This House should be the very last institution to lecture a college which has been so successful in running its affairs and creating the highest standard of medicine in the whole world. It was lectured by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central and by the hon. Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson). They would consider it extraordinary if we in this House were to lecture the trade unions and co-operative societies about how to manage their institutions. In the great City of Leeds, where we have a co-operative society with no political affiliations, the members of the Labour Party are continually trying to get rid of the postal ballot. Here it seems that members of the Labour Party want to introduce a postal ballot.
What this House should do when we pass the Bill, as I am sure we shall, tonight is to send the Royal College a message of thanks and admiration for the great services which it renders and the way in which it runs its College. We should congratulate it on its enormous plans for developing the College and medical research and medical education and,wish it great luck in this venture.

9.4 p.m.

Dr. J. Dickson Mabon: I am pleased to be able to follow the hon. and gallant Member for Ripon (Sir M. Stoddart-Scott), with whom I serve in another capacity, because I know that he, as one Member of the House at least, will accept that there are many of us on this side, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) and my hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson),

who have spoken already, who take second place to none in our admiration for the work and antiquity of the Royal College of Physicians.

Sir M. Stoddart-Scott: They did not say that.

Dr. Mabon: On reflection, the hon. and gallant Member will realise that they did. Certainly, having read HANSARD, he will see that that was said specifically by each of my hon. Friends.
I wish to associate myself with the remarks of all hon. Members in relation to this excellent institution. We must not pretend, however, that because it has a great record, therefore it is completely without any defect and without any defect that could be altered slightly in some way to make matters more in tune with the times. Even the hon. Gentleman himself has actually had the temerity to do what, after all, we are being accused of, that is, to suggest reform. He has suggested that the present system of choosing the Fellows is not a good one. He has advanced this strange argument that a public meeting of the Fellows, even though 10 per cent. of the electorate turned out, namely, 90 out of 900, was somehow not a good thing and that one ought to have for the final selection committee, so to speak, a much smaller number than 90. In this connection he used a phrase which so astonished me that I wrote it down. He used the phrase, "The smaller the better", because the smaller the number, the higher would be the quality of those selected. That was the argument. I hope I do not misrepresent the hon. Gentleman in thus enunciating his argument.
What it means is that he would so reform the Royal College that there would be a special committee of the Fellows to decide who would be the new Fellows and that the remaining 900 would take no part whatsoever in the election of the Fellows.
The hon. Gentleman was, perhaps, moved to use this rather extreme form of argument because he was so very busily engaged in knocking down another argument which incidentally no one has advanced—certainly no one on this side of the House. The only people who have advanced a case for rejecting this argument, which I repeat was never made, have been the Royal College and


the hon. Gentleman tonight. The Royal College in its submission to us argued against the case for having the Members elect Fellows.
Who is the sponsor of this idea? Whose idea was it? I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman in replying to the case from this side of the House would have been good enough to have addressed himself to the three excellent suggestions put forward by my right hon. Friend the Member for St. Pancras, North (Mr. K. Robinson). His three suggestions—let me run over two of them—were that there should be a postal vote for Fellows, that the whole 900 should vote or be given the opportunity to vote, as the electors of this country are entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections. If for some very good reason they are unable to be present at the polling stations on Election day they are entitled to exercise their right of a postal vote. That does not seem to me a revolutionary doctrine.
The hon. Member's second point was that the members, who are, after all, the majority of all those associated with the institution, ought to be allowed with the Fellows to elect the officers of the Royal College. I cannot see how that is bad. I certainly recognise a very good argument in favour of it in the character of letters which some of us have received about this matter.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Clapham (Dr. Alan Glyn) has gone, because I hoped that in the process of going through Parliamentary experience he would not fail to listen to any protest made by a constituent of his. I had one doctor write to me and say, "I am a member of the silent opposition." I find that amazing, particularly when we are told by the official brief sent to us. and I quote
 members have never done so, and neither has any member of the College ever complained to the College.
If, in fact, no member has complained to the College, there have been those who have written to my hon. Friends and to me, and to other hon. Members who have spoken. The actual number of members who have spoken to me about this comes to about 12, I think, on a quick count, and I have had six letters.
I now understand why it is that these people do not wish to go into print and why it is that I am asked by every one,

except one, not to read his letter or to mention his name. It smacks very much of an oligarchy dispensing patronage and that one must not offend it or may not get even a reasonable and justifiable share of the patronage.
The hon. Gentleman said we were lecturing the College about the situation, and so on, and saying that we may as well lecture the trade unions. I hope we do lecture the trade unions. I for one wholeheartedly disagree with the present electoral practice in the Electrical Trades Union. I think that is quite despicable—

Mr. Deputy-Speaker: The hon. Member is going too far from this Bill.

Dr. Mabon: I know you are charitable, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and will not be too severe with me for trying to rebut what was said in another similar argument which managed to escape the notice of the Chair. That is the point. I think it is perfectly right to use this analogy that where matters are wrong we should protest and object.
It is obvious that there is something very seriously wrong when men of medicine, educated and trained in a very great art and who occupy very substantial positions throughout the country, should be unable because of fear of their own incomes, position or future prospects to speak up and make radical constitutional changes within their own organisation. There is something fundamentally wrong. If all these hon. Members say that it is irrelevant for us to argue this case, then where do we on behalf of our constituents make an objection?
I think that the Bill is an admirable one. We hope that the Royal College will perhaps listen to people who are trying to express on behalf of a number of others in the country their very great concern about the governing of this College of Medicine. The Scottish College has not had a dissimilar practice in many ways in the past, but they are at last turning in on themselves to consider their own usages. I am glad to say that they are looking upon this matter favourably. If there were any suggestion anywhere that this Royal College was willing to do that, or had even discussed this matter, I am sure that this objection would not have come before the House of Commons.
The fact is that the College has categorically and officially refused to consider any reform of its constitution and practice. It is quite above reproach in its own opinion. That sort of self-satisfied, smug attitude is, to my mind a very wrong way for a distinguished College to conduct itself.
There is no sense in trying to take all the virtues and accomplishments of a collective body and praise them for that, and then endorse an oligarchic system of Government. This kind of thing is reflected in countries which we regard as being in chains. It seems almost Orwel-lian that in the correspondence I have had—almost in line with George Orwell's "1984 "—these men are not in a position to express their opposition. I have done so tonight on behalf of some men who taught me when I was a student, and I find it almost incredible that I as a young man should have to do it. I do it on behalf of men senior to me in my profession and on behalf of men who were at the university with me. They have confidence that I would never divulge their names or get them into trouble. I wonder if other men, if they had similar confidence in their M.P.S, would have written more letters to hon. Members opposite and made representations.
This is an argument against the hon. Member for Clapham, who says that he has received no representations—at least, I presume that he has not—and that he will not be swayed by this argument of numbers and must receive at least 2,000 letters before he believes that any part of 4,000 are in disagreement. This is an argument of rebuttal to him. Perhaps men are frightened that their names will be given. In this House one hon. Member to my knowledge—he is now a Minister of the Crown—committed the grave blunder of divulging the confidence of a constituent in relation to one of his own ecclesiastical superiors. That was a despicable and wretched thing to do. It is like a breach of confidence between doctor and patient.
I hope that, having made our protest tonight about what we think is an unfair practice, the Royal College will have second thoughts about this, and that we may not only see the Bill on its way but also see in a few years' time a change in the government of the Royal College, which alas is sadly needed.

9.15 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health (Miss Edith Pitt): It ill, perhaps, be convenient if I intervene very briefly at this stage to give the views of my Department on the Bill. Hon. Members may find them helpful. I have been most interested that all speeches so far have paid tribute to the Royal College of Physicians. Indeed, the hon. Member for Greenock (Dr. Dickson Mabon) went out of his way to make clear, in, case his hon. Friends had not already done so, the admiration which they felt for this ancient institution. Nor has any speech from either side of the House been critical of the objects of the Bill; in so far as they have been referred to in the speeches, they have been commended. But many of the speeches have dwelt at some length on a point which is not included in the Bill.
The position is, as I see it, that the objects of the Bill are unexceptionable and are greatly desired by a most respected section of the medical profession. The opposition to the Bill has been based on matters which are not connected with the Bill in any way— namely, what is alleged to be the undemocratic attitude of the College, and particularly the way in which the Fellows are selected from the members and the rule that members of the College are not allowed to vote in the Fellowship election.
I am not the person to comment on those allegations tonight, for this is private legislation. Some answer has already been made across the Floor. Whether they are justified or not, they are nothing whatever to do with the merits of the Bill and they should be pursued within the profession. My right hon. and learned Friend understands that there is machinery which would enable this to be done. It is perfectly true that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Dr. Stross) made the point that he thought that the machinery was extremely limited. Nevertheless, we are advised that there is a vehicle through which these protests could be raised in the Council by the Standing Committee of Members.
Having listened to the debate so far, I think that there is nothing to justify the rejection of the Bill. The entirely


separate issues which have been raised by some Members have no bearing on the matters contained in the Bill, which all of us feel are admirable. We do not wish that its purpose should fail because of a discussion quite outside the province of the Bill. I commend the Bill to the House and hope that it will be given a Second Reading tonight.

Dr. Stross: Before I use the fatal words, may I say that one could never resist the blandishments of the hon. Lady or of the hon. Member for St. Maryle-bone (Sir W. Wakefield). Although we do not withdraw one word of what we said, and we hope that the Royal College will have listened to and will study what we have said, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Main Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time and committed.

Orders of the Day — SUPPLY

Again considered in Committee.

Original Question again proposed.

Whereupon Motion made, and Question, That the Chairman do report Progress and ask leave to sit again—[Mr. Legh]—put and agreed to.

Committee report Progress; to sit again Tomorrow.

Orders of the Day — EDUCATION (MATHEMATICS TEACHERS)

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Legh.]

9.20 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Skeffington: I ought to begin by apologising to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education for bringing him to the House again after the debate which has already taken place today on education, but when I balloted for this subject I was not aware that there would be another opportunity to discuss education. I consoled myself, and I hope that it may also console the Parliamentary Secretary, by believing that the subject of this short Adjournment debate is somewhat limited and specialised and that it may be more convenient for everybody to have it separately discussed rather than it should have been dealt with in the general debate today.
I realise that the shortage of teachers of mathematics is one which is giving some concern to those, both inside and outside the House, who are interested in education. There is a real fear that adequate numbers of teachers of these specialised subjects are not only not available at present but that there seems to be some indications that they will not be available in sufficient numbers even in the future. I hope that in this short debate we shall be able to get an up-to-date picture which will be helpful. It is difficult outside the Ministry to be certain what the trends are. I hope that some of the things that the Minister is doing, and that the action which will have to be taken, will receive adequate publicity as a result of the debate.
I gave notice to the Parliamentary Secretary's office that to some limited extent I should have to refer to teachers of science as well, simply because it is difficult to disentangle figures for separate subjects since very often teachers of mathematics and teachers of science are lumped together. The only reason why I give priority to mathematics is that if one has to choose priority, the teaching of mathematics must come before that of the other sciences, because it is the basis of so much of the training required in science in general.
The nation has had a number of warnings about this shortage of these specialist teachers. It might be useful if I briefly referred to some of them, because the statements which have been made by various interested and knowledgeable bodies carry more weight than my own hunches or limited researches. In mentioning them, I am conscious that some of the data on which forecasts were based may now be out of date, but that is one of the reasons why I hope that this debate will be of service to education.
The first alarming report to which I would refer appeared four years ago. It was a report prepared by a subcommittee of the Association of Teachers in Colleges and Departments of Education and was entitled "The Supply of Mathematics and Science Teachers". At that time, in 1956, it made serious reading. It dealt especially with the situation in teacher-training colleges. This, of course, is of great importance since the bulk of teachers pass through these establishments.
On page 42 of this very well-prepared and documented Report among the conclusions of the sub-committee attention is drawn to these remarkable figures at that time: that 25 out of 75 of the women's colleges had no mathematics lecturer and that 43 of the women's colleges were without a lecturer with any qualifications in physics or chemistry. The fifth fact to which it drew attention in paragraph 20 of the recommendations was that the whole of the mathematical and scientific staff in all the teacher-training colleges represented only 14·8 per cent. of the total staff. We should all be glad to hear whether there has been any improvement —I hope that there has—in the ratio of this teaching of mathematics and in the other scientific subjects. It was a most unfortunate deficiency.
On page 18, referring to the statistical data, the report says:
There is an obvious need for many more lecturers to make a real study of the problems of arithmetic teaching and contribute specialist knowledge to the educational work of the colleges. The problem is of such magnitude that it seems quite essential for the colleges to appoint to their tutorial staffs many more whose major academic interest is in mathematics
Elsewhere, it is noted, as it is in the Crowther Report, that only about 3·5 per

cent. of women students in the teacher-training colleges show real interest in mathematics.
The report also stated—at the time it was commented cm by various educational journals—that if something was not done to remedy the shortage of qualified college teachers its effect would be felt in the schools for twenty, thirty or as some people suggested, forty years. That was the first warning, backed by a good deal of statistical information, and I hope that the Minister may be able to indicate some improvement where urgent action was most obviously required.
I wish also to refer to a survey about schools where there would be fewer teachers directly from teacher-training colleges. This was an International Survey called " Secondary School Mathematics ", printed, in the Mathematical Gazette in October, 1958, from an address given by the President of the Mathematical Association, Mr. W. J. Langford. He revealed that in 1958 he had written to the heads of every public school and grammar school in England and Wales asking for particulars about the staffing and the scope of their mathematics teaching. He got replies from over 50 per cent. of the schools and, as he said:
… the summary of the situation makes interesting (and alarming) reading. The return from 19 of our greater public schools shows that 149 men are teaching mathematics and of these only 20 have insufficient qualification in the subject.
As one would expect, the schools with the best conditions are able to attract the highest qualified staff. That ratio was 13 per cent. inadequately qualified which had to be contrasted with an average of 22 per cent. of those with inadequate qualifications from 384 county schools; 30 per cent. from the 130 voluntary schools and 25 per cent. from the 47 direct grant schools.
The position of girls' schools, as one has already learned to expect from the figures in the women's training colleges —the same kind of tendency is reflected right through—was an 11 per cent. deficiency for public schools; 16 per cent. for the 174 county schools; 24 per cent. for the 39 voluntary schools; 19 per cent. for the 44 direct grant schools.; and 27 per cent. for 39 other public schools.
So, again, except for the top schools, the percentage of those who were teaching mathematics in 1958 and were not really adequately qualified or trained was very much higher than anyone would wish to be able to report. That survey was made only two years ago. I wish to emphasise that it deals with schools which can provide the very best conditions for teachers often in regard to surroundings and in regard to emoluments, where the Burnham scale would often be exceeded.
I have referred to the Crowther Report, but I wish to refer particularly to paragraphs 149 and 150, because they deal with this matter specifically. They show that—alarming is perhaps too strong a word—an unsatisfactory trend. In paragraph 149 and in Table 15, the Report deals with graduates teaching in secondary-modern schools. The Report says that
there has been a decline in the proportion of men graduates in modern schools whose main field of study was in mathematics or science, from 33 per cent. in 1947 to 21 per cent. in 1958
The total number of graduates were greater, but having regard to the increased school population it means that fewer qualified teachers of this subject are available in the modern schools, which is something everyone will regret. One of the things we want to know is how the Minister proposes to put the matter right.
The following paragraph deals with the position of women graduates and the figures follow on from what I have said about women's training colleges and teachers mentioned in the survey made by Mr. Langford. There we find that the proportion is lower still than for men, 13 per cent. compared with 20 per cent. and that the 13 per cent. of those qualified to teach mathematics or science is 2 per cent. less than in 1953. So the decline has been very serious indeed. Paragraph 150 of the Report concludes:
there is a marked deficiency on the mathematics and science side—and average of half a graduate per modern school is surely insufficient. This deficiency is greater for women teachers than for men, and also more serious because of the considerable number of training college students, especially in the women's colleges, who have done virtually no mathematics for three or four years before their admission, and had been unable to secure a pass in Ordinary level in that subject.

That is the last of the specific pieces of evidence I wish to call to my aid this evening. A picture is presented which warrants the concern which has been expressed and which, I hope, will enable us to review what has been done by the Ministry since.
I pass to the Question I asked on 25th February, which appears among the Questions for Written Answers in column 82 of HANSARD for that day. I asked the Minister what were the number of teachers with specialist qualifications in science and mathematics in all types of State schools, the numbers of unfilled vacancies and the anticipated shortages in 1961-65. I do not want to read the whole Answer, which, obviously, the Parliamentary Secretary will know, but I draw attention to a feature which seems disquieting. But in the Answer, it was said:
An inquiry made in 1958 showed 244 vacancies in these schools for mathematics teachers and 261 for science teachers. On the basis of an annual net increase of 500 mathematics and science graduates the shortage of these teachers on 1959 staffing standards would be 500 in 1961, 750 in 1962, 900 in 1963, and 350 in 1964. In 1965 there would be 250 available to improve on 1959 standards.
Then there is a qualification.
The actual shortage will depend upon the results of the present drive to increase the number of graduates and on the output of specialists from training colleges."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 25th February, 1960; Vol. 618, c. 82–3.]
That is a qualification that I understand and accept.
My first comment is that the unfortunate people who will be at school in 1962, 1963 and 1964 may well suffer rather serious harm because of the shortage of specialists. I know that there is very little that can be done about that, but even if we accept the fact that by 1965 we may be within measurable distance of the shortage disappearing we shall still be having staffing standards based on 1953, which are far from those I am sure all of us desire.
I wonder whether the Minister has not been a little too optimistic about his assumption that there will be a net annual increase of 500 graduate teachers in mathematics and science. If one looks at the figures contained in Command Paper 893, the Annual Report of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, one sees that there has been an increase of 261 science


and mathematics graduate teachers in grant-aided schools since 1956, 440 in 1957 and 331 in 1958, and, if my figures are right—the figures are not in the Report—in 1959 the increase is very much smaller. I make it about six, but I may be wrong. At any rate, there has certainly been a decline between 1956 and 1959.
Paragraph 4 of the Report of the Advisory Council stated that
The number of science teachers in schools has been increasing, but the increase in the numbers of well-qualified teachers of mathematics, physics and chemistry has not, unfortunately, been sufficient to meet all demands arising from the increase in the number of children studying science. It is clear that great efforts will be required if the shortage of teachers is not to hinder the development of science courses, not least in schools other than grammar schools.
I agree, as I am sure we all do, with that last sentiment.
That was a review of the situation in the 1958–59 Report. One wonders whether the Minister's figures are not, therefore, optimistic. I know that the Minister has covered himself by his caveat, but I should be very glad to hear from him whether he has any later prognostications about the matter. Certainly, the Report of the Advisory Council on Scientific and Engineering Manpower in Great Britain, 1959, Cmnd. 902, seems to be a little apprehensive, for it says, in paragraph 46:
The Scottish and English figures of vacancies are based on different standards and there is no doubt that the figure for England and Wales greatly underestimates the number of additional teachers who would be needed to restore 1953 staffing ratios and to meet all the new demands in secondary schools. To achieve the latter objective might require a further 4,000 to 5,000 science teachers.
That was an up-to-date warning which seems to me to repeat in substance the earlier ones. I very much hope that— as used to be said when we attended the cinema—this is not where we came in. It appears to me from the prognostications that the situation is not very much better than in 1956.
It would be inappropriate of me to offer any suggestions about what could be done, because these ideas have been canvassed so often, but I must say that getting the additional teachers seems to me to depend partly upon cash. I have a recent example of a well-qualified

mathematics teacher in a public school in London—I had better not mention the district, or the school might be identified—who had become a little dissatisfied with his job and was asked whether he would consider joining an electronics firm.
The firm said that it would be delighted to have him. He was asked what salary he would like. Being a teacher and a modest man, he merely asked for double his salary. He was told, "We could not possibly ask you to go all through the dislocations of changing jobs for that. We should certainly want to give you about three times your present salary". The profession has lost a very good teacher to industry, I hope not permanently. Perhaps in time he will become dissatisfied with industry, and the rewards, which are not often cash rewards, of education will attract him back.
Professors Carter and Williams, in their Science in Industry, sum up what I have said about cash by simply saying, on page 133:
We have heard no convincing suggestions for alleviating this shortage"—
that is, of science and mathematics teachers—
other than by paying science and mathematics teachers (and if necessary other teachers) more. To say this is not to assert that teachers do, or should, teach only for the pay; a man may have to choose between a vocation to teach and a sense of obligation to his family, and it is not reasonable to expect that family obligations will always come second ".
This has to be the subject of negotiations between teachers and the authorities, but it would be of great interest to everyone in the profession if the Parliamentary Secretary can give us any hint on it.
The Association of Scientific Workers issued a recent report on Education for Science. The Association made some suggestions which are worthy of mention. It believes that there might well be a campaign with inducements to release both from the Civil Service and from industry those with scientific and mathematical knowledge who could teach in the schools, either whole time or part time. This is a very good suggestion. I know that there are all kinds of difficulties, but in such a desperate situation this suggestion is both constructive and possible. Indeed, I know that in connection with the sandwich courses, which are


highly specialised, people come from industry to take their share in the teaching work.
The second suggestion made by the Association was that there should be a national drive to bring back more married women teachers with specialist qualifications and that, where necessary, refresher courses should be provided. On these subjects one cannot always just pick up the point of teaching exactly where one left off five or ten years ago, but the suggestions should be considered.
The Association's last suggestion is that there should be more provision for laboratory space and laboratory assistance. This refers to the teaching of science. One small, but often quite important, point in determining whether people stay is the fact that so many teachers of science have to do washing up and bottling in addition to teaching. They may have to do much preparation work, which wastes their time and uses their energy and could be done by the fairly economical provision of such assistance.
I hope that shall not be considered, impertinent for mentioning those suggestions, but we are all anxious to solve the problem. I am sure that I do not need to point any moral at the end of my survey based on the sources I have given to the House, but in this scientific age, with space exploration and everything else confronting us, unless we adequately prepare future generations to take their part in these problems we face a rather gloomy future. Perhaps many of us wish that we did not live in the scientific age, but it is here and we must face it. What I am most anxious to do is to ensure that the precious talent which I know exists amongst our children can be properly trained, and one of the provisions which we must make is adequate specialist teachers if we are to make any real progress in education.

9.45 p.m.

Mrs. Eirene White: We are all very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (Mr. Skeffington) for having raised this exceedingly important subject. We have all too few occasions in this House to discuss the more detailed aspects of education, and it is very fortunate when some one with an interest in these matters chooses such a subject for the Adjournment debate.
I only wish that there were rather more hon. Members present. After all, there still remains three quarters of an hour for debate, and I propose to take only three or four minutes. I sincerely trust that the Parliamentary Secretary will speak for more than three or four minutes, because I expect him to give an adequate answer to the points raised, and also to give us the most up-to-date information that is available.
I make no pretence to being a mathematician or a scientist—very far from it—but I have been reading with intense interest a report that has only just come to my hand on mathematics, education and industry; a report of a conference of teachers, research scientists and industrialists held last year at the University of Liverpool. It has only just been published, and I wish that there had not been such a time lag between the holding of that most excellent conference and the publication of the report.
Among many very interesting contributions to the Report, is one from Sir Gilbert Flemming, of the Ministry of Education, and another from Mr. Rowlett, one of Her Majesty's inspectors on the teaching of mathematics in schools, and on the supply of teachers. Unfortunately, those contributions were made just about a year ago, and I very much hope that they will be brought up to date by the hon. Gentleman.
I agree with my hon. Friend that we have had examples before—and one or two were mentioned earlier today—of complacency on the part of the Ministry on the whole question of the supply of teachers. The people at the Ministry are apt to give estimates of the increased numbers that are to be obtained in various categories that are then falsified by the event. We therefore want to know what their real estimation now is, particularly for teachers of mathematics.
It seems clear, unless the position has changed considerably in recent months, that it is the teachers of mathematics who are so difficult to come by; much more so than those of the scientific subjects. It does not appear from the reports I have been able to obtain that there really is very much of a reserve of mathematicians in industry who both wish to teach and are suitable for teaching, and who could be released to any very great extent.
One cannot assume that because a man is a good mathematician for industrial purposes he is necessarily also a good teacher of mathematics. And although they certainly can and do help in sandwich courses and in other respects, I do not think that one can look to industry for a solution, even of the short-term problem, on an emergency loan basis.
Still less, of course, can one look to industry for the supply of teachers for the grammar schools or the modern schools. The quality of the teaching of mathematics in modern schools, especially with the number of children now staying on for a fifth year, is becoming more and more important. The future of these children in industry may largely depend, again, on the quality of the teaching they can obtain in the modern schools. There are shortages in the grammar schools as well and, again, quality matters.
There is a very interesting passage in one of the discussions that took place at this conference on the need to have first-class mathematics teachers, not just for the sixth form but quite a way down the school. Aptitude does not necessarily go with age. If someone is to be a good mathematician it is likely that he will show it when quite young, and the passage points out that it is a fallacy to pretend that only in the last two eyars at school does the quality of mathematics teaching matter. The bright youngster in the fourth form cannot only appreciate or despise, as the case may be, a brilliant or dull master, but gets an invaluable stimulus from a really good teacher.
We are rightly concerned with this matter. It does not affect only this country. As the House is aware, I have for many years taken a close interest in colonial affairs, and in particular African affairs. I have been reading a most interesting book by a former Member of this House, Mr. Kenneth Younger, on "The Public Service in New States". This public service includes the education service. He points out that in West Africa, for example, where the pace of development is almost startling, there is a very acute shortage of teachers precisely in these science and mathematics subjects. He points out also that there is a time lag, that they try to indent on London for teachers in these subjects and

they may have to wait up to three years to obtain them. I have heard similar heart-rending stories from education officials in East Africa who ask, "How can we get better standards in our schools when we cannot obtain these teachers?" This is not merely a domestic problem. It is a Commonwealth problem as well. There should be no fear of over-expansion in teacher-training in this matter.
I wish to refer to another aspect. Everyone talks hopefully of bringing back women teachers. One of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington, with startling figures, is the shortage of staff in women's training colleges. I had not realised quite how bad the situation was four years ago. I hope that we shall have some figures from the Parliamentary Secretary to let us know whether the situation in the women's training colleges is still as deplorable as it was only four years ago.
The number of women who are being equipped to teach mathematical subjects is clearly not large. On the other hand, a woman either in a training college or as a graduate teacher, who is equipped, is a very precious person, and if she can be encouraged to come back, so much the better.
I should, however, like to ask the hon. Gentleman a question which I should also like to ask his right hon. Friend and one or two other Ministers, and it is this. To what extent are they consulting the Chancellor of the Exchequer in this matter of the return of women teachers, and particularly where highly-qualified and scarce personnel are involved? Because of the aggregation of salaries for Income Tax and Surtax purposes it is not worth while for a married woman teacher to return to work if her husband earns a reasonable salary as a professional man. Her income is aggregated with his and tax is paid on the joint income. She gets no relief for a domestic substitute for herself in order to look after her home while she is teaching.
At most she is likely to do part-time work, and she may possibly be in a position where she could do full-time work. The disincentive of our tax system is such that if she is well qualified, and her husband too, she is


unlikely to come back into full-time teaching, even though she might be able to do so, and even though it might be to the advantage of the community. The probability is that a good deal of public money will have been spent on her education which, of course, will be a poor investment if she uses her skill for only a short period and then marries, and does not return later when she might well be able to do so.
I hope that this very important aspect of the return of women to teaching will be considered by the Ministry. It applies, of course, to other forms of teaching but it applies with particular intensity to the teaching of mathematics because this seems to be a place where there is an acute scarcity. I hope that this will be considered by the Minister of Education, if he has not already done so, and that he will, if necessary, open diplomatic discussions with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
I make this suggestion not on the basis of feminist justice or anything of that kind but on the basis of expediency. If we want the women back, we must look at the matter realistically in order to see what it is that keeps some of them from coming back. Because I am very anxious that we should have an adequate supply of qualified teachers and I fear that we shall not have it for some years to come, I have ventured to make these observations.

9.55 p.m.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education (Mr. Kenneth Thompson): I am extremely grateful to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harling-ton (Mr. Skeffington) for introducing this subject in tonight's Adjournment debate, and I congratulate him on having the good fortune to do so when we have rather longer to deploy our subject than is our usual lot on these occasions. The hon. Gentleman has no need to apologise to the House for taking an opportunity like this to air a subject of such transcending importance in education. I am personally grateful to him, and I am sure that all who are concerned with the matter will share my gratitude and appreciation.
I assure the House that there is anything but complacency in the Ministry of Education about the supply of mathematics and science teachers. We

recognise it to be one of the key factors upon which will depend the success or otherwise of our whole education effort. We relate it, as does the hon. Gentleman, to how our country will survive in a world which is increasingly scientific, increasingly technological and increasingly complicated, demanding more and more that those who are to play their part in its life shall understand its techniques and sciences very thoroughly upon a sound basis of good mathematics education. We recognise all this, and our plans, proposals and efforts are directed towards remedying the shortage, which is only one of many facing the Ministry of Education, in the knowledge that these are extremely important considerations.
I do not at all deny that we face in the whole education system a serious shortage of teachers of mathematics, particularly of the higher quality, and of teachers of science subjects. The number of surveys and reports on the matter is almost legion. Several have been referred to in both speeches this evening. I am supplied with various other documents bearing on the same subject. I cannot answer all the detailed questions which arise from references to all the reports which have been made. Mine would be a complicated and even more than usually boring speech if I attempted to do so. Such gaps as there are in my information this evening I shall attempt to fill by correspondence after I have had time to ascertain the correct answers, since no others will satisfy.
The mere existence of all these documents, and the mere fact that the investigations have been carried out and so many reports have been made, is evidence enough that great concern is felt about the situation and great efforts are being made, first, to be precise about the need and, second, to be accurate in deciding what steps should be taken to meet it.
A survey was carried out in the schools in March last year. This showed that there were 5,100 people with honours degrees teaching mathematics in maintained schools, and 4,500 of these were in 2,600 maintained secondary schools with G.C.E. courses in mathematics or science. In these same 2,600 schools, there were at that time 250


vacancies for these teachers; that is to say, honours graduates to teach mathematics in maintained schools.

It being Ten o'clock, the Motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Noble.]

Mr. Thompson: There were also in these same schools at that time 3,250 non-graduate specialists teaching to G.C.E. standards. These figures show that there is a very large number of honours graduates, the highest degree of skill that we can command, available to maintained schools in the country at the present time. The figure of 250 vacancies, and I think about the same number of posts said to be not satisfactorily filled, is a measure of the need that was visualised at that time in these schools.
One other factor that we have to take into account in considering the situation is that, of the honours mathematics graduates who come from our universities, two-thirds already go into the education system at some point. It may be that, taking into account all the various demands that there are in industry and in education in all its forms, the output of mathematics graduates is insufficient. Indeed, I suppose we must all accept that that is the case, but I am quite sure that the House will be with me if I suggest that for the education system as a whole to capture the services of two-thirds of those who are produced is a pretty high accomplishment, and one that would in present circumstances and in the foreseeable future be very difficult indeed to improve upon.
The question arises of the quality of the graduates who are now available in our maintained system. The Crowther Report drew attention to the quality of the graduates, drew certain conclusions from age-range tables which were published about that quality, and suggested that the evidence was that the quality of graduates available to the schools was declining. I wonder if closer examination of the figures, and the circumstances in which the figures were produced, bears out that conclusion. It is true that the older men in the higher age-range tended on average to have higher

academic qualifications than those in the middle range of the table, while the younger men at the other end of the table again had higher qualifications.
The reasons seem to me to be that in the years before the war, when it was difficult for honours graduates, as for others, to be completely free in the choice of profession which they would follow, they passed more readily into the teaching profession. In the years immediately after the end of the war, the industrial demand for this particular professional skill was enormously greater than could be satisfied by the output from the universities, and a larger proportion of skill was siphoned off into industry, particularly at a time, which we all recall, when the qualified men willing to go into certain types of industry were granted deferment and held deferment so long as they held certain types of industrial appointments.
For a time, teaching was not included in that bracket, and the figures shown in the graph reflect the preferential treatment accorded to industrial appointments. Then came the time when teaching also carried with it deferment for those particularly qualified men and women, and so the figures showed an improvement. Indeed, during the time when teaching did qualify a man for deferment, there was a net gain of about 500 honours graduates into the teaching profession. Since 1957 these people have been completely free to choose where they would serve, whether in industry or in the teaching profession, and we have continued to make a modest net gain.
I wonder whether in all our discussions we are completely fair to the products of the training colleges.

Mrs. White: Before the hon. Gentleman leaves the other point. I wonder whether he has taken into account in any calculations of the future the fact that deferment from National Service will no longer play a part.

Mr. Thompson: I am first trying to deal with the position as I see it now. I then hope to come to what developments we can reasonably expect in the near future.
I was suggesting that perhaps we are not being completely fair to the products of the training colleges. It is difficult to be precise about the standard of qualification attained by both graduates and


non-graduates in their capacity to convey their speciality to the scholars and the students with whom they have to deal, but I am fairly certain that many who come from our training colleges are quite capable of teaching mathematical subjects, and some of the sciences, certainly to O level G.C.E. standard with a large measure of success; and that some of the brightest among them will be able to take these subjects at a much higher level and satisfy some part of the demand for teachers who can take students on to A level.
I hope very much that we will not lose sight of the fact that a very large part of the teaching of mathematics and of some of the sciences in our maintained schools is being done with very great success by those who have come through the training college courses into the profession.

Mr. Skeffington: I hope that the Parliamentary Secretary does not think that I suggested that there is anything wrong with the quality of the teachers from training colleges. What I was trying to get over was the fact that in women's colleges less than 4 per cent. take mathematics and that the teaching staff in mathematics is so small. If there are insufficient teaching staffs for mathematics it is bound to reflect on the number of teachers.

Mr. Thompson: I will refer to what we might hope for almost immediately.
Recognising the shortage and our anxiety to take steps to bridge the gap, the House is entitled to ask what we are doing and what we hope to do. Many of the present groups being taught to A level in our schools, particularly in the grammar schools, by the graduates who are already in service, are very small— for example, groups of five, six and eight in the grammar schools. As the numbers of students increase who come up to take up the A level course, much of that demand can be satisfied by increasing the size of some of the smallest of the groups.
A measure of the need can be met by the resources already available to us. At the same time, we are trying to entice, if that word has no unpleasant connotations, into the profession more and more graduates from the universities. As I say, we are getting a fairly large share at the moment, but another parallel pro-

cess is going on in that the universities themselves are increasing their output. If we maintain our proportion of two-thirds we will increase the number and if we can improve on the proportion we intend to do so.
My right hon. Friend has given his blessing and I think a vote of thanks to the Associations of Headmasters and of Headmistresses who have undertaken the job of visiting the universities and putting over as professional leaders themselves the attractions of a career in teaching. I took note of the hon. Member's statement that a man he knew had been tempted from the paths of righteousness by the offer of a salary three times that which he could get as a teacher. There is nothing we could do that would compete with that kind of reward.
It would be equally wrong for anyone to go away with the idea that the rewards of teaching are in self-satisfaction only. Salaries of teachers today are not the poor things that they were some years ago. The last improvements in the Burnham scales give a special weighting to these very kind of people whom we are seeking to draw into a profession which has its rewards as well as its satisfaction. I very much hope that the steps we are taking, with the help and collaboration of the vice-chancellors, will be enough to bring forward into the service of education a lot more of those who are trying to make up their minds where they should spend their working lives.
A booklet has been published, with which, I have no doubt, the hon. Member is familiar, entitled "A Career in Education for University Graduates", which sets out in attractive terms both the conditions in which the work will be done and estimates of the rewards that can be achieved by those who do well. There is no harm in our recognising that not everyone who goes into industry gets an enormous salary, even people who may be equipped with this kind of degree and qualification. There are those who make the middle way and those who do not do so well, just as there are in any career, not least in politics.
We would be wrong to compare the best that industry can do with the poorest that is available to those who do not do so well in education. Education today is quite capable of rewarding those who


do well commensurately with the degree of success that they achieve. I hope that tonight's debate will have done enough to highlight both the need that we recognise for these teachers and the warmth of the welcome that awaits them.
The hon. Lady the Member for Leeds, South-East (Miss Bacon) referred to the need to attract married women and gave me the impression that she thought we were simply using this as a faint appeal that would allow us to get out of a difficulty by making it one of the things that we said we were trying to do. I do not intend to enter into a debate about whether we should do something to alter the system of aggregation of tax or adopt some other device to make the resulting position more attractive to the other partner in a marriage in which two are working. This position is not special to teaching. It applies throughout all forms of work in which the man and the woman both earn a living, and increasing numbers do it today.
That is an exercise that the hon. Lady will be able to carry on with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who, I have no doubt, will be able to give her good reasons either why he can or why he cannot meet her on this point. I could not help thinking that here was an opportunity for me to say something about the criticism of our tax system by hon. Members opposite in describing it as a disincentive, but perhaps I had better not raise the matter this evening since harmony has been the predominant note in our proceedings so far.
What I want to be repeated this evening and bruited abroad as far as it can be is that we need these married women to come back into teaching. The system of rewards is not negligible, even allowing for the tax system. The women themselves have the benefit of having been educated to perform this task. We would welcome them in the schools. Most of the schools would be willing to find ways of providing either part-time or full time for these teachers if they would be willing to do it. I very much hope that those who can do so will do so.
I have referred to the fact that increasing use is being made in our schools of the products of the training colleges.

There are many non-graduates taking mathematics and science in the schools to a quite high level and many more of them, in increasing numbers, coming from the training colleges. In 1956–57, there were in the training colleges 518 students taking mathematics as a main course. In 1959–60 that figure had risen to 854. Then, taking the supplementary year in mathematics, with which the House will be familiar, in 1956–57 the number was 97; in 1959–60 the figure had risen from 97 to 282, a very considerable increase. I am sure the House will be aware of the important effect which the three-year course is bound to have, which we are confident it will have, on those taking mathematics among their subjects, as a short specialist course, as well as other subjects. We believe that it will throw up both opportunities for more potential maths specialists and for the maths specialists themselves to take the subject to greater depth than would be possible in a two-year course.
We have produced this further booklet, "Teaching Mathematics in Secondary Schools", quite one of the best publications for which the Ministry is responsible, and I would very much hope that those who are in any way, however mildly, interested in teaching mathematics will get a copy and find out what wonderful and exciting possibilities there are in the secondary schools of today in teaching this subject.
Additionally the House should know, and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be interested to know, that there are more refresher and short courses in mathematics promoted by the Ministry than there are in any other subject for which the Ministry runs this kind of course. The results can be seen in these figures. In 1954 there were 71,000 O level passes; in 1959 there were 106,000 O level passes from maintained secondary schools. In 1954 there were 13,000 A level passes; in 1959 the figure was 21,000, approximately a 50 per cent. increase in the output of successful students from the system.
So I think it may be said, without, I hope, laying myself open to the charge of complacency—I am sorry it was levelled at a time when the matter is being given so much thought in the Ministry—that


we recognise both the nature and the extent of the problem. We are very much aware that there are limits to what can be done to produce both mathematicians and scientists for the schools or any other purpose, but we are doing all that we can in all these various ways to try to close the gap between the need, which we

recognise, and the resources which are available. I very much hope that the House will feel that this matter, which is not yet solved, is, at any rate, engaging our urgent attention.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at eighteen minutes past Ten o'clock.